ABSTRACTHusserl's phenomenology of intersubjectivity is often thought to fall into solipsism and thus be a failed project. One of the typical symptoms is the so-called “paradox of incorporation”. The key to avoiding the paradox lies in finding the motives that lead to alien experiences. An important effort in this direction is to extend the so-called phenomenon of “double sensation” limited to the tactile realm to all perceptual realms. However, the legitimacy of the extension is based on the recognition of (...) a pre-subjective, anonymous, and impersonal dimension, which exorcizes, but not answer the question. This article attempts to make a new interpretation of Husserl's fifth Cartesian Meditation. It focuses on the concept of “replacing” and argues that the motivational basis of alien experience is the desire for total naturalization. (shrink)

“If I were a better human being, that person’s voice wouldn’t sound so shrill to me.” Many of us may have had such thoughts. They give voice to the worrying intuition that if we were less affected by sexism and racism, or better at keeping our tempers, our fellow humans would look and sound differently to us. Making sense of this unease requires us to re-think the relation between experiences and standing commitments; to reconsider what we mean by self-control; (...) and to attend to empirical questions about perception, attention, emotion regulation, and tacit cognition. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Schellenberg’s Capacitism about Phenomenal Evidence, according to which if one is in a phenomenal state constituted by employing perceptual capacities, then one is in a phenomenal state that provides phenomenal evidence. This view offers an attractive explanation of why perceptual experience provides phenomenal evidence, and avoids difficulties faced by its contemporary alternatives. However, in spite of the attractions of this view, it is subject to what I call “the alien experience problem”: some alien experiences (e.g. (...) clairvoyant experience) are constituted by employing perceptual capacities, but they do not provide phenomenal evidence. This point is illustrated by a counterexample which is similar to, but also different in some important respects from, Bonjour’s famous clairvoyant Norman example. At the end of the paper, I sketch a restricted version of Capacitism about Phenomenal Evidence by putting some etiological constraint on the perceptual capacities employed. (shrink)

This paper tackles Husserl’s early analysis of alien experience and its relation to the methodological framework of the _Logical Investigations_ (LI). Since intersubjectivity first becomes a central theme for Husserl in his writings of 1905 (_Seefeld Blätter_), less attention is usually paid to his analysis of our experience of other minds in the LI. In this context, I attempt to highlight both the fundamental insights gained by Husserl in this analysis that will also remain key for his later accounts of (...) empathy, as well as the challenges alien experiences raises for the theoretical framework of LI. I begin by discussing the main relevant traits of the phenomenological project of LI as a preparatory endeavor for the elucidation of logical objectualities, and the radical way in which Husserl defines its domain, i.e., the sphere of immanent content. Then I analyse Husserl’s understanding of alien experience in terms of an indicative unity based on associative motivations. I argue that, in doing this, Husserl accounts for a non-inferential intuitive access to other minds and, at the same time, maintains their essential alienness. Finally, I show that this account rests on what I call an “intentional contamination” of Husserl’s reductive method of LI. (shrink)

The contemporary Finland is more culturally diverse than previous years thanks to increased international migration. A large number of immigrants entering Finland today are religious in one way or another. This article is a case study of religious beliefs and experiences of protestant Christian immigrants in Finland with the aim of finding out the personal feelings of immigrants towards the Finnish society. A comparative analysis of Protestant Christian immigrants’ experiences in both the host country and country of origin (...) was taken as a foundation for determining effects of the immigrants’ religious beliefs in Finland. This study takes a cross-cultural perspective in analyzing and evaluating the religious beliefs of immigrants. Even though religion is credited to have an upper hand in facilitating social integration of immigrants into host societies, this study found out that religious beliefs and experiences of protestant Christian immigrants in Finland can be integrating or alienating, depending on the degree of religiosity of the immigrants. An awareness of this observation as discussed in this article goes a long way in providing options to choose from in navigating the common problems faced by Protestant Christian immigrants in Finland. (shrink)

Some monothematic types of delusions may arise because subjects have unusual experiences. The role of this experiential component in the pathogenesis of delusion is still not understood. Focussing on delusions of alien control, we outline a model for reality testing competence on unusual experiences. We propose that nascent delusions arise when there are local failures of reality testing performance, and that monothematic delusions arise as normal responses to these. In the course of this we address questions concerning the (...) tenacity with which delusions are maintained, their often bizarre content, the patients' inability to dismiss them, and their often circumscribed character. (shrink)

This article reintroduces a phenomenological experiment designed in the early 1960’s, The Alien-Hand Experiment (TAHE), and it illustrates how phenomena denoted by theoretical concepts like body image, body schema and agency can be studied via the experiment. An analysis of the verbal reports from 26 subjects who participated in TAHE is presented in this article. Subjects were divided into three groups: A group of non-bulimic men, a group of non-bulimic women and a group of female bulimics. The group of (female) (...) bulimics was studied due to the widely spread notion that subjects suffering from eating disorders have a distorted body image. TAHE can be thought of as both a qualitative and quantitative way to study the phenomena arising when the normal relationship between motor behaviour and body experience is disrupted. The present investigation is not an operational definition of body schema and body image, but the two concepts offer a useful interpretive framework. (shrink)

In this musing we consider how social distancing, the primary public health measure introduced to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, is creating social encounters characterized by a self-and-other-consciousness and an atmosphere of suspicion, leading to what we call “alienated embodied communication.” Whilst interaction rituals dominated by avoidance, fear and distrust are novel for many individuals who occupy positions of social privilege, Black and ethnic minority writers have demonstrated that the alienated bodily communication of COVID-19 social distancing is “nothing (...) new” for people who routinely experience marginalization as a result of racism. Our aim in this musing, then, is to reflect on how on-going experiences of stigma, shame, and marginalization can shape how social distancing is registered on an embodied and existential level, and therefore how social distancing may differentially impact individuals with lived experiences of racism. (shrink)

This paper aims to lay out the main tenets of Bernhard Waldenfels’s analyses of the experience of the alien and to confront the philosophical thesis underwriting them with a central insight stemming from Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy. In the first section, I reconstruct the outlines of the experience of the alien, as described by Waldenfels, and show that, on his account, this experience can function as a powerful impetus enabling us to call into question some of the most deeply held commitments (...) of Western philosophical tradition: the sovereignty of the ego, the supremacy of order, the priority of the whole. In the second section, I show how a patient analysis of this experience compels us to undertake an inquiry concerning the “inter-world,” understood as the place of the encounter and the threshold of separation between the own and the alien. Finally, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s alternative description of the “inter-world,” I maintain that Waldenfels’s account is insufficiently radical and show that the in-between realm cannot be assimilated to an interstice lodged between two insulated spheres. Rather, the “inter-world” should be conceived of as a shared dimension, subtending the partition between the spheres of ownness and alienness, as the one inclusive world. (shrink)

How do speakers learn the social meaning of different linguistic variants, and what factors influence how likely a particular social–linguistic association is to be learned? It has been argued that the social meaning of more salient variants should be learned faster, and that learners' pre‐existing experience of a variant will influence its salience. In this paper, we report two artificial‐language‐learning experiments investigating this. Each experiment involved two language‐learning stages followed by a test. The first stage introduced the artificial language and (...) trained participants in it, while the second stage added a simple social context using images of cartoon aliens. The first learning stage was intended to establish participants' experience with the artificial language in general and with the distribution of linguistic variants in particular. The second stage, in which linguistic stimuli were accompanied by images of particular aliens, was intended to simulate the acquisition of linguistic variants in a social context. In our first experiment, we manipulated whether a particular linguistic variant, associated with one species of alien in the second learning phase, had been encountered in the first learning phase. In the second experiment, we manipulated whether the variant had been encountered in the same grammatical context. In both cases we predicted that the unexpectedness of a new variant or a new grammatical context for an old variant would increase the variant's salience and facilitate the learning of its social meaning. This is what we found, although in the second experiment, the effect was driven by better learners. Our results suggest that unexpectedness increases the salience of variants and makes their social distribution easier to learn, deepening our understanding of the role of individual language experience in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning. (shrink)

The article addresses the psychological experience of the "We" developed in Being and Nothingness (BN), and how it resonates within the social dynamics of Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR). It is problematized about which "We" is spoken in the condition of Being-with. In BN, Sartre demonstrates that the foundation of human relationships is conflict, as being-with-others is rooted in being-for-others. This, therefore, reflects on the impossibility of psychological experiences of the Us-object and We-subject to support alienation and engagement. (...) We start from the conjuncture of serial collectivity to address the experience of the Us-object, and the necessity of individual choice for engagement with others, which may or not occur when the experience of Us-object takes place. In this way, when individuals recognize themselves as part of a structure organized by a third party and aim for a common goal, the community subject happens. We noticed that Sartre, in Being and Nothingness and its developments, helps us to think about being-with-another, even in a virtual world of the 21st century. Sartre, throughout his life and although without success, strove to materialize the Being that he idealized for people: mutually committed to the responsible construction of a socio-material field “desirable for a community”, including conflict resolutions. (shrink)

Each person has a special relation to his or her own well-being. This rough thought, which can be sharpened in different ways, is supposed to substantially count against objectivist theories on which one can intrinsically benefit from, or be harmed by, factors that are independent of one’s desires, beliefs, and other attitudes. It is often claimed, contra objectivism, that one cannot be _alienated_ from one’s own interests, or that improvements in a person’s well-being must _resonate_ with that person. However, I (...) argue that every theory of well-being must allow that we can be alienated from our own well-being, and that sophisticated objectivists can accept and make use of a resonance constraint against their opponents. (shrink)

It is not necessarily the case that we ever have experiences of self, but human beings do regularly report instances for which self is experienced as absent. That is there are times when body parts, mental states, or actions are felt to be alien. Here I sketch an explanatory framework for explaining these alienation experiences, a framework that also attempts to explain the “mental glue” whereby self is bound to body, mind, or action. The framework is a (...) multi-dimensional model that integrates personal and sub-personal components, psychological and neural processes. I then proceed to show how this model can be applied to explain the action-related passivity experiences of persons suffering from schizophrenia. I argue that a distinctive phenomenological mark of these experiences is that they are vividly felt, unlike ordinary actions (those taken to belong to self), and I seek to explain these heightened sensory experiences from within the proposed framework. I also propose hypotheses concerning such phenomena as thought insertion and anarchic hand syndrome that are motivated by this framework. Finally, I argue that the proposed model and view of self-experiences is consistent with several aspects of and theories of consciousness, especially theories which indicate that consciousness is more likely to be engaged when we are dealing with novelty or error—e.g. when self seems to have gone missing. I conclude by recommending that if we wish to learn about self, we would be well advised to attend closely to those times when it seems absent. (shrink)

In Capitalism, Alienation and Critique Asger Sørensen offers a wide-ranging argument for the classical Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, thus endorsing the dialectical approach of the original founders (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) and criticizing suggested revisions of later generations (Habermas, Honneth). Being situated within the horizon of the late 20th century Cultural Marxism, the main issue is the critique of capitalism, emphasizing experiences of injustice, ideology and alienation, and in particular exploring two fundamental subject matters within this (...) horizon, namely economy and dialectics. Apart from in-depth discussions of classical political economy and Hegelian dialectics, the explorative and inclusive argument also takes issues with Émile Durkheim’s theory of value, the general economy of Georges Bataille and the dialectics of Mao Zedong. -/- - See below External Links to the book's homepage at the publisher Brill and to the Introduction. - See also External Links to a Youtubevideo from a seminar on the book in Belgrade, November 2019 and two Author Meet Critics sections from 2020 and 2021. (shrink)

Subjectivity theories of consciousness take self-reference, somehow construed, as essential to having conscious experience. These theories differ with respect to how many levels they posit and to whether self-reference is conscious or not. But all treat self-referencing as a process that transpires at the personal level, rather than at the subpersonal level, the level of mechanism. -/- Working with conceptual resources afforded by pre-existing theories of consciousness that take self-reference to be essential, several attempts have been made to explain seemingly (...) anomalous cases, especially instances of alien experience. These experiences are distinctive precisely because self-referencing is explicitly denied by the only person able to report them: those who experience them deny that certain actions, mental states, or body parts belong to self. The relevant actions, mental states, or body parts are sometimes attributed to someone or something other than self, and sometimes they are just described as not belonging to self. But all are referred away from self. -/- The cases under discussion here include somatoparaphrenia, schizophrenia, depersonalization, anarchic hand syndrome, and utilization behavior; the theories employed, Higher-Order Thought, Wide Intrinsicality, and Self-Representational. Below I argue that each of these attempts at explaining or explaining away the anomalies fails. Along the way, since each of these theories seeks at least compatibility with science, I sketch experimental approaches that could be used to adduce support for my position, or indeed for the positions of theorists with whom I disagree. -/- In a concluding section I first identify two presuppositions shared by all of the theorists considered here, and argue that both are either erroneous or misleading. Second, I call attention to divergent paths adopted when attempting to explain alienation experiences: some theorists choose to add a mental ingredient, while others prefer to subtract one. I argue that alienation from experience, action, or body parts could result from either addition or subtraction, and that the two can be incorporated within a comprehensive explanatory framework. Finally, I suggest that this comprehensive framework would require self-referencing of a sort, but self-referencing that occurs solely on the level of mechanism, or the subpersonal level. In adumbrating some features of this “subpersonal self,” I suggest that there might be one respect in which it is prior to conscious experience. (shrink)

Losing an intimate other to death belongs to the most uprooting experiences in human life. Not only is it accompanied by a range of negative emotions such as sorrow, longing, anger etc., but profound grief is a limit experience that causes a rupture in the sense of self of the bereaved. This experience is often expressed in identity statements such as ‘I no longer feel like myself’ or ‘I am missing part of myself’. Although such experiences are richly (...) reported in empirical studies on grief and implemented in diagnostic criteria for pathological grief, their experiential meaning is largely left unexplored. In this article, I suggest that being bereaved of an intimate other is self-alienating because our sense of self is a distributed phenomenon relying on daily confirmation through interaction with our habitual environment. When our lives are intertwined with intimate others, this habitual identity become a dyadic structure, relying on a heteronomy. Being bereaved of this intimate other leads to a profound impoverishment of the habituated sense of self, leading to self-alienation. Finally, I discuss the process of returning to a non-alienating state and suggest that this is not exclusively a cognitive process, but equally an embodied process of appropriating a habitual identity. (shrink)

It is not necessarily the case that we ever have experiences of self, but human beings do regularly report instances for which self is experienced as absent. That is there are times when body parts, mental states, or actions are felt to be alien. Here I sketch an explanatory framework for explaining these alienation experiences, a framework that also attempts to explain the “mental glue” whereby self is bound to body, mind, or action. The framework is a (...) multi-dimensional model that integrates personal and sub-personal components, psychological and neural processes. I then proceed to show how this model can be applied to explain the action-related passivity experiences of persons suffering from schizophrenia. I argue that a distinctive phenomenological mark of these experiences is that they are vividly felt, unlike ordinary actions (those taken to belong to self), and I seek to explain these heightened sensory experiences from within the proposed framework. I also propose hypotheses concerning such phenomena as thought insertion and anarchic hand syndrome that are motivated by this framework. Finally, I argue that the proposed model and view of self-experiences is consistent with several aspects of and theories of consciousness, especially theories which indicate that consciousness is more likely to be engaged when we are dealing with novelty or error—e.g. when self seems to have gone missing. I conclude by recommending that if we wish to learn about self, we would be well advised to attend closely to those times when it seems absent. -/- . (shrink)

It has often been said that we should enter into a dialogue with thinkers of the past because they discussed they same problems we still have today and presented sophisticated solutions to them. I argue that this “dialogue model” ignores the specific context in which many problems were created and defined. A closer look at various contexts enables us to see that philosophical problems are not as natural as they might seem. When we contextualize them, we experience a healthy (...) class='Hi'>alienation effect: we realise that problems discussed in the past depend on assumptions that are far from being self-evident. When we then compare these assumptions to our own, we reflect on our own theoretical framework that is not self-evident either. This leads to a denaturalisation of philosophical problems – in the past as well as in the present. I argue for this thesis by examining late medieval discussions on mental language. (shrink)

Best known for his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau is often considered a recluse who emerged from solitude only occasionally to take a stand on the issues of his day. In _Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal_, Shannon L. Mariotti explores Thoreau’s nature writings to offer a new way of understanding the unique politics of the so-called hermit of Walden Pond. Drawing imaginatively from the twentieth-century German social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, she shows how withdrawal from the public (...) sphere can paradoxically be a valuable part of democratic politics. Separated by time, space, and context, Thoreau and Adorno share a common belief that critical inquiry is essential to democracy but threatened by modern society. While walking, huckleberrying, and picking wild apples, Thoreau tries to recover the capacities for independent perception and thought that are blunted by “Main Street,” conventional society, and the rapidly industrializing world that surrounded him. Adorno’s thoughts on particularity and the microscopic gaze he employs to work against the alienated experience of modernity help us better understand the value of Thoreau’s excursions into nature. Reading Thoreau with Adorno, we see how periodic withdrawals from public spaces are not necessarily apolitical or apathetic but can revitalize our capacity for the critical thought that truly defines democracy. In graceful, readable prose, Mariotti reintroduces us to a celebrated American thinker, offers new insights on Adorno, and highlights the striking common ground they share. Their provocative and challenging ideas, she shows, still hold lessons on how we can be responsible citizens in a society that often discourages original, critical analysis of public issues. (shrink)

Disturbances to one's sense of self, the feeling that one has ‘lost a part of oneself’ or that one ‘no longer feels like oneself,’ are frequently recounted throughout the bereavement literature. Engaging Allan Køster's important contribution to this issue, this article reinforces his suggestion that, by rupturing the existential texture of self-familiarity, bereavement can result in experiences of estrangement that can be meaningfully understood according to the concept of self-alienation. Nevertheless, I suggest that whilst Køster's relational interpretation of (...) alienation as the withdrawal of heteronomy can be applied to the experience of world-collapse in bereavement, what sets bereavement apart from other limit situations is the fact that it involves an intersubjective relation between the living and the dead. In contrast to Køster, therefore, I suggest that the experience of self-alienation that is distinctive to bereavement results from the fact that the bereaved is exposed to, and co-opted by, the absolute alterity of death itself. (shrink)

I argue that metaethicists should be concerned with two kinds of alienation that can result from theories of normativity: alienation between an agent and her reasons, and alienation between an agent and the concrete others with whom morality is principally concerned. A theory that cannot avoid alienation risks failing to make sense of central features of our experience of being agents, in whose lives normativity plays an important role. The twin threats of alienation establish two (...) desiderata for theories of normativity; however, I argue that they are difficult to jointly satisfy. (shrink)

Thought insertion is a common delusion in schizophrenia. People affected by it report that there are thoughts in their heads that have been inserted by a third party. These thoughts are self-generated but subjec-tively experienced as alien (hereafter, we shall call them alien thoughts for convenience). In chapter 5 of Transparent Minds, Jordi Fernández convincingly argues that the phenomenon of thought insertion can be accounted for as a pathology of self-knowledge. In particular, he argues that the application of the bypass (...) model of self-knowledge can shed light on what is amiss in people with thought insertion. In this brief commentary, we examine the proposal by Fernández, highlight some of its strengths, and raise one main objection to it. In mainstream philosophical accounts of thought insertion, people who report the delusion are thought to have ownership of the alien thoughts, but to lack a sense of agency with respect to such thoughts, and this is supposed to explain why they ascribe the thoughts to some-one else. Fernández correctly identifies the limitations of mainstream accounts of thought insertion. First, to claim that people with the delu-sion of thought insertion own the alien thoughts does not sit well with the phenomenology of thought insertion as it is reflected in people’s self-reports. Second, people do not need to experience a sense of agency with respect to a thought in order to ascribe the thought to themselves. Sense of agency is too demanding a condition for self-ascription. Fernández puts forward a novel account of thought insertion, at-tempting to solve the problems identified with mainstream accounts. He defends the view that thought insertion is a failure of self-knowledge that consists in the person failing to ascribe one of her be-liefs to herself. Similar accounts to the one Fernández develops in the chapter have been defended by Bortolotti and Broome (2009) and Pickard (2010). For Fernández, the failure in self-ascription is due to the fact that the person with thought insertion does not feel pressured to endorse the content of a belief that she has [Fernández (2013), p. 142]. Fernández explains this phenomenon in detail by reference to the bypass model of self-knowledge. When Fernández develops his own proposal, he relies on the claim that the alien thought is a belief. We challenge this claim.We agree with Fernández that, in thought insertion, the person does not ascribe the alien thought to herself and does not commit to the content of the thought being true, in spite of the thought being self-generated. Such considerations powerfully suggest to us that the alien thought is not a belief. Given the elusive nature of mental states in general and beliefs in particular, this may seem just a terminological issue. But in the present context, whether the alien thought is a belief is important in order to offer a characterisation of thought insertion that makes jus-tice to the first-person reports and other behavioural manifestations of people with the delusion. One may also argue that, as the model of self-knowledge Fernández applies to alien thoughts, that is, the bypass model, is a model of self-knowledge for beliefs, such a model could only feature in the explanation of thought insertion if alien thoughts were beliefs. But we do not think this is necessarily the case, as in the book Fernández successfully applies his bypass model to other types of mental states, such as desires. (shrink)

Intimacy and Alienation puts forward the author's unique paradigm for psychotherapy and counselling based on the assumption that each patient has suffered a disruption of the `self', and that the goal of the therapist is to identify and work with that disruption. Using many clinical illustrations, and drawing on self psychology, attachment therapy and theories of trauma, Russell Meares looks at the nature of self and how it develops, before going on to explore the form and feeling of experience (...) when self is disrupted in a traumatic way, and focusing on ways towards the restoration of the self. Written in an accessible style from the author's singular perspective, Intimacy and Alienation will appeal to professionals in the fields of psychotherapy, counseling, social work and psychiatry, as well as to students and the lay reader. (shrink)

The concept of bodily alienation is promising for critical phenomenologies of race because it marries description and evaluation. With this concept, we can go beyond mere descriptions of lived experience and provide arguments for challenging the status quo. In fact, we can steer clear of another danger: an overly “objective” form of theorizing about race that is unresponsive to the lived experiences of the subjects whose lives it aims to reimagine. By contrast, phenomenologies founded on the concept of (...) bodily alienation teach us which social interactions and spaces alienate people of color. In turn, this knowledge can help us envision a more hospitable world for all. (shrink)

An investigation into what happens in creative practice when the materials of art and research behave and perform in ways beyond the creators' intentions. In Alien Agency, Chris Salter tells three stories of art in the making. Salter examines three works in which the materials of art—the “stuff of the world”—behave and perform in ways beyond the creator's intent, becoming unknown, surprising, alien. Studying these works—all three deeply embroiled in and enabled by science and technology—allows him to focus on practice (...) through the experiential and affective elements of creation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic observation and on his own experience as an artist, Salter investigates how researcher-creators organize the conditions for these experimental, performative assemblages—assemblages that sidestep dichotomies between subjects and objects, human and nonhuman, mind and body, knowing and experiencing. Salter reports on the sound artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (O+A) and their efforts to capture and then project unnoticed urban sounds; tracks the multi-year project TEMA (Tissue Engineered Muscle Actuators) at the art research lab SymbioticA and its construction of a hybrid “semi-living” machine from specially grown mouse muscle cells; and describes a research-creation project (which he himself initiated) that uses light, vibration, sound, smell, and other sensory stimuli to enable audiences to experience other cultures' “ways of sensing.” Combining theory, diary, history, and ethnography, Salter also explores a broader question: How do new things emerge into the world and what do they do? (shrink)

The authors present a materialist analysis of the effects of neoliberalism in education. Specifically, they contend that neoliberalism is a form of cultural invasion that begets necrophilia. Neoliberalism is necrophilous in promoting a cultural desire to fix fluid systems and processes. Such desire manufactures both individuals known and culturally felt experiences of alienation which are, it is argued, symptomatic of an imperialist nostalgia that permeates educational policy and practice. The authors point to ‘unschooling in schools’ as a mechanism (...) for resisting the necrophilous tendencies of contemporary formations of education. (shrink)

Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast majority of the stuff in our universe, and even in our lives, remains beyond serious philosophical concern. In _Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing_, Ian Bogost develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being—a philosophy in (...) which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, Bogost’s alien phenomenology takes for granted that _all_ beings interact with and perceive one another. This experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and becomes accessible only through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor. Providing a new approach for understanding the experience of things _as_ things, Bogost also calls on philosophers to rethink their craft. Drawing on his own background as a videogame designer, Bogost encourages professional thinkers to become makers as well, engineers who construct things as much as they think and write about them. (shrink)

Alienation theory has acted as the stimulus for a great deal of research and writing in the history of sociology. It has formed the basis of many sociological ‘classics’ focused on the workplace and the experiences of workers, and has also been mobilized to chart wider social malaise and individual troubles. Alienation theory usage has, however, declined significantly since its heyday of the 1960s and 1970s. Here, the reasons why alienation theory was ‘forgotten’ and what can (...) be gained by ‘remembering’ alienation theory are explored. To realize this ambition this article proceeds by (1) briefly visiting differing definitions of alienation theory, before charting its high point, and the various debates and tensions of the time, during the 1960s and 1970s; (2) analysing the reasons why alienation theory fell from grace from the 1980s onwards; (3) elaborating how and why alienation theory is still relevant for sociology and the wider social sciences today. (shrink)

A central feature of being a celebrity is experiencing a divide between one's public image and private life. By appealing to the phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, we analyze this experience as paradoxically involving both a disconnection and alienation from one's public persona and a sense of close connection with it. This ‘uncanny’ experience presents a psychological conflict for celebrities: they may have a public persona they feel alienated from and that is at the same time closely connected to (...) them and shapes many of their personal interactions. We offer three ways in which a celebrity might approach this conflict: (i) eradicating the divide between their public and private selves, (ii) splitting or separating their private and public selves, or (iii) embracing the arising tension. We argue that it is only this third approach that successfully mitigates the negative effects of the alienation felt by many celebrities. (shrink)

In phenomenology, the delusion of thought insertion is described and explained in different ways. There is a common idea that the delusion depends either on a lack of sense of agency or on a confusion between self and others. I propose that the delusion is an alienation in regard to what is expressed in some thoughts, that make them unfamiliar. In this perspective, the delusion has to do with the fact that the lifeworld expressed in inserted thought is given (...) in a second-person perspective, is rooted in a different lived-body experience than one’s own. This contrasts with ordinary thoughts which are given in the first-person perspective, with which we have a sense of intimacy. This discussion is an opportunity for putting forth the idea of the second-person perspective: that is, certain experiences of the world are given to me through others, as distinct from those that are given to me directly as a lived body. In inserted thoughts, there is a sense in which some perspectives of reality, different to my own, are disclosed through an alien voice or through inside me. The distinction between the first person and second person perspectives leads to a better understanding of the primal constitution of the self and of others, based on the relation between the body and the world as it is given to us. (shrink)

One of the central questions within contemporary debates about collective intentionality concerns the notion and status of the we. The question, however, is by no means new. At the beginning of the last century, it was already intensively discussed in phenomenology. Whereas Heidegger argued that a focus on empathy is detrimental to a proper understanding of the we, and that the latter is more fundamental than any dyadic interaction, other phenomenologists, such as Stein, Walther and Husserl, insisted on the importance (...) of empathy for proper we-experiences. In this paper, I will present some of the key moves in this debate and then discuss and assess Husserl’s specific proposal, according to which reciprocal empathy, second-person engagement and self-alienation are all important presuppositions for group-identification and we-identity. (shrink)

The alienation of labour is both classical and contemporary. In its classical form, it speaks to the potential dehumanisation of workers in capitalist societies. In its contemporary form, it manifests itself in the disenfranchisement of the individual because of changes in organised global workplaces. Over the years, Africa’s labour transition from traditional spirituality to contemporary organised global workplaces has fuelled new forms of public labour alienation. Civil servants, in some African countries, experience labour alienation reminiscent of work (...) under capitalism. This is in contradiction to the pre-colonial and traditional view of work as a vocation. Zimbabwe is undergoing negative economic, social, and political growth that has resulted in the alienation of civil servants. The government reneges on its public role of providing space for individual growth and well-being in preference for ‘public capitalism’ and cultural alienation. The potential for an effective public service lies in changing the work culture. Contribution: This article interrogates the impacts of the work culture within the public service in Zimbabwe in an attempt to proffer a return to the African traditional spirituality of work that was founded on the principles of ubuntu. It recognises the traditional symbiotic relationship between being and doing among the indigenous African communities as the panacea for the continent’s human capital development. (shrink)

In this article, I apply a structural-phenomenological conception of experience and self to the anthropological theorizing of spirit possession. In particular, I argue that a phenomenology of the alien, as elaborated by the philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels, allows for a more differentiated understanding of possession phenomena. Following a characterization of alienness—in conceptual distinction from the more common term “otherness”—as a dimension that necessarily eludes experience, I describe spirit possession as a cultural technology to appropriate the experiential alien by transforming it into (...) the symbolic other. I discuss this relation to the alien in thematic areas central to the anthropology of possession: illness and therapy, symbolism and naming, embodiment and self. (shrink)

Summary This research is into the experience of alienation amongst British adolescents. The study had three major aims: firstly to investigate potential differences across various dimensions of alienation on the basis of gender, ethnicity and religion. Secondly, to establish a relationship between alienation, self?esteem and selected undesirable school behaviours. Finally, there is an attempt to evaluate the use of alienation scales as a research tool in education. The study involved 254 participants aged between 13 and 15 (...) years attending large, multi?ethnic comprehensives. The findings show that reported levels of alienation were influenced by religious orientation but only minimally by gender or ethnicity per se. Reported alienation negatively correlated with self?esteem but was positively associated with truancy, exclusion and disruptive behaviour. The authors conclude that, whilst alienation remains a useful concept for educational research, it is unhelpful to see it as an inevitable consequence of deprivation or membership of certain social groups. (shrink)

Schweickart and I both discuss market socialism. Neither of us accepts the traditional Marxist view that market economies necessarily produce contradictions that drive them toward collapse. Both of us think the socialist experiments of the twentieth century show that markets cannot successfully be eliminated. Thus, for market socialism, we keep a market and we work to prevent it from producing contradictions, alienation, and collapse. One question that arises here concerns the role of labor unions. Should they play a major (...) role in market socialism, or are there respects in which they would obstruct it? There is another important issue that Schweickart should discuss. Market socialism, given its commitment to a market, must face the issue of market generated alienation or fetishism. Can market socialism avoid such problems? And if so how? (shrink)

Our emotions can be revealing. They can not only reflect our character traits and our judgments, but they can also tell us things about ourselves that we do not fully realize or may not want to admit. In this chapter, I am particularly interested in how we relate to what I will call alienated emotions: emotional experiences that are unusual, surprising, or even disturbing. What, if anything, do our alienated emotions tell us about who we are? I argue here (...) that alienated emotions lead to important questions about the ethics of self-interpretation. (shrink)

In this article we discuss Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s hermeneutical interpretation of Odysseus’ encounter with Circe in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. This encounter is further interpreted – via the ecofeminist homology between women and nature – as an answer to “the siren song of nature,” in which the elements of attraction and threat to human subjectivity are deeply intertwined. Whereas his crew gives in to the siren song and experiences the pleasure of being swine, enlightened Odysseus himself resists the temptation (...) by forcing Circe to establish a contract with him, the prototypical marriage that leads to the schizophrenic mythification of housewife and prostitute. It will be argued that there exists towards nature in late-modernity a homologous stance – that of environment and wilderness.Based on these assumptions, we are able to draw a few conclusions that are relevant for the wilderness-debate in general and the plea for wilderness restoration in particular. First of all, I accept the social-constructivist argument of the inaccessibility of pristine, wild nature, as I argue there is an ontological alienation from nature that cannot be overcome. Indeed, it appears that the Marxist distinction between first nature and second nature affiliates with social-constructivist assumptions. Nevertheless, I seek to avoid the moral indifference often implied by social-constructivism by employing Adorno and Horkheimer’s eudaemonist critique of enlightenment, and argue that another, historically determined form of alienation from nature operates in the background.Although Adorno and Horkheimer do not provide us with practical measures to effect a reconciliation of humanity and nature, they do provide us with a conceptual instrument to critique certain tendencies within our society’s ecological policy. (shrink)

This article shows to what extent the new situation in our late-modern societies can see a further deepening of the social control typical of soft totalitarianism we experience in our globalised democracies, through the mechanisms already denounced by Arendt in her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): the promotion of rootlessness and superfluity. In particular, the paper focus on what Eliot (1927) called the hollow man or what philosophy and sociology have called the one-dimensional man, the absent subject or the saturated (...) self, which the technological, social, cultural and economic environment in which we live so favours. The article diagnoses the reasons and means by which the alienation of the subject occurs, but proposes narrative and testimony as ways of combating social control of a psychopolitical kind [1]. [1] Investigación financiada por el proyecto del Banco de Santander – CEU titulado “Control social, posmodernidad y comunidad política” (COSOPOC) con código B920PR02 // FUSPBC-PPC14/2018. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Is It To Be Fashionable? Appearing Fashionable Two Concepts of Fashion Fashion and Alienation The Metaphysics of Fashion.

This article aims to present the life and work of German thinker Hartmut Rosa as a philosopher of interest for nursing. Although his theoretical framework remains fairly unknown in the nursing domain, its main key concepts open up a philosophical and sociological approach that can contribute to the understanding of a wide range of study phenomena related to nurses, nursing, and healthcare. The concepts of social acceleration, alienation, and resonance are useful to explore healthcare organizations' performance by bringing the (...) time dimension of modernity to the center; to grasp nurses' experiences of caring for patients; and to understand nurses as agents endowed with the capacity to deploy their political agency to create alternative forms of relationship to themselves, to others, and the world, challenging the institutional order of healthcare organizations when it fails to resonate with their professional ethos. In this article, we propose Hartmut Rosa's theoretical framework as a new and inspiring phenomenological and critical lens that should be further explored to advance knowledge concerning phenomena that are found at the crossroads of the nursing domain and other fields of knowledge. (shrink)