A book review of Farhang Erfani, Aesthetics of Autonomy: Ricoeur and Sartre on Emancipation, Authenticity, and Selfhood (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011).

Sartre and Ricœur have never been compared in detail before, as hermeneutics and existentialism have been wrongly pitted against each other. The Aesthetics of Autonomy demonstrates that an existential hermeneutics overcomes the respective limitations of each philosopher and gives us the necessary tools of seeking autonomy in an age of uncertainty, which is the globalized world.

Before setting up the notion of “creation of the self,” Sartre intends to defeat the very concept of creation on the ontological level. He makes the statement that the created entity would not enjoy the least autonomy because it would depend wholly upon its creator. Sartre maintains that a created being cannot escape divine subjectivity, unless it is self-supported and self-sustained, that is, uncreated. Catholic scholar Sertillanges completely changes the deal: in his view, it is because of its existential (...) autonomy that some entity may be described in terms of dependence upon a creator, which does not jeopardize the autonomy of the creature. Focusing on the arguments rather than on the broader topic of self-creation in existentialism, this paper compares these two accounts of what the metaphysical thesis of creation amounts to. (shrink)

Ricœur lectured and wrote for over twenty years on negation (‘Do I understand something better if I know what it is not, and what is not-ness?') and never published his extensive writings on this subject. Ricœur concluded that there are multiple forms of negation; it can, for example, be the other person (Plato), the not knowable nature of our world (Kant), the included opposite (Hegel), apophatic spirituality (Plotinus on not being able to know God) and existential nothingness (Sartre). Ricœur, working (...) on Kant, Hegel and Sartre, decided that all these forms of negation are incompatible and also fatally flawed because they fail to resolve false binaries of negative: positive. Alison Scott-Baumann demonstrates how Ricœur subsequently incorporated negation into his linguistic turn, using dialectics, metaphor, narrative, parable and translation in order to show how negation is in us, not outside us: language both creates and clarifies false binaries. He bestows upon negation a strong and central role in the human condition, and its inevitability is reflected in his writings, if we look carefully. Ricœur and the Negation of Happiness draws on Ricœur's published works, previously unavailable archival material and many other sources. Alison Scott-Baumann argues that thinking positively is necessary but not sufficient for aspiring to happiness - what is also required is affirmation of negative impulses: we know we are split by contradictions and still try to overcome them. She also demonstrates the urgency of analysing current socio-cultural debates about wellbeing, education and equality, which rest insecurely upon our loose use of the negative as a category mistake. (shrink)

The Critique of the Transcendental Ego: On Sartre's and Ricoeur's Heidegger InterpretationsAccording Otto Pöggeler Heidegger's main brake with Husserl consists in his rejection of the tran-scendental constitution conceived as the life of an "absolute Cogito," replaced by Heidegger by the "factual life" from which phenomenology should always begin. The author of this paper argues that the problem about the starting point of phenomenology also appears later in the debates between Heidegger and Sartre, as well as in Ricoeur's Heidegger interpretation. Thus, (...) the aim of the article is to analyze to what extent the positions of Heidegger, Sartre, and Ricoeur contradicts or even exclude each other, and to what extent they cross or eventually complement each other. The inquiry shows that Heidegger's accusation of Sartre's forgetting of the question about the sense of being of Dasein is unjustified. Equally untenable is Sartre's critique of Heidegger, that he had bypassed the Cogito as a starting point of the existential analysis, because Sartre's transcendence of the Cogito, which pretends to involve the transphenomenal Being, cannot be derived from it and risks to fall again in the trap of "phenomenalism," which Sartre reproached to Husserl. Ricoeur's Heidegger interpretation brings clarity to this discussion by pulling together the decentration of the subject and the limits of apodicticity of the Cogito. But his elaboration of the hermeneutics of the Self contains the risk of a hyperbolization of the role of language. (shrink)

How can one overcome self-centeredness in order to care for and do justice to significant others as well as foreigners? “Establish the right distance,” is the imperative that Ricœur formulates in order to address the paradox of autonomy and vulnerability, and to reintroduce an ethical conception of justice at the heart of political power. This article shows how understanding justice in light of vulnerability leads us to take into account both the violence coextensive with social relations and political conflicts and (...) the restoration of agency required by such circumstances. Whether it is conceived in light of difference, dissimilarity or interval, the “right distance” that Ricœur calls for is based on a symbolic topography of the common good, which establishes a relationship of interdependence between the subject and others. (shrink)

This article assesses a realm of psychoanalytic social theory that is relatively under-discussed – existential psychoanalysis – in order to gain further insight into the relationship of psychoanalytic ideas to humanism. I offer a reading of certain influential thinkers in this tradition, namely Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, presenting conceptual clarifications while highlighting a cluster of important aspects of their respective repertoires relevant to humanism. I do so with the intention of teasing out how contributing voices to existential (...) psychoanalysis negotiate humanism’s foundational ideas, specifically the notion of ‘the individual subject’, with the bed-rocks of psychoanalytic thought, namely the unconscious. Finally, I conclude with critical commentary on the existential-psychoanalytic project drawn from what is often thought of as the anti-humanist tradition, with specific attention paid to Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Judgment accounts for the sharing of a common world, experienced affectively, by a diverse human plurality. In order to appreciate Kant's project, Judging Appearances retrieves the connection between appearance and judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Kleist emphasizes the important but neglected idea of a sensus communis, which provides the indeterminate criterion for judgments regarding appearance. Judging Appearances examines the themes of appearance and judgment against the background of Kant's debt to Leibniz and Shaftesbury. Drawing upon treatments (...) by Husserl, Sartre, Ricoeur and Arendt, Kleist delineates the proto-phenomenological method through which Kant uncovers the idea of a sensus communis. Kleist shows that taste is a discipline of opening oneself to appearance, requiring a subject who dwells in a common world of appearances among a diverse human plurality. This volume will prove valuable for anyone interested in a fresh approach to themes at the heart of Kant's aesthetics. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre, at the height of his powers, debates with Italy’s leading intellectuals In 1961, the prolific French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre was invited to give a talk at the Gramsci Institute in Rome. In attendance were some of Italy’s leading Marxist thinkers, such as Enzo Paci, Cesare Luporini, and Galvano Della Volpe, whose contributions to the long and remarkable discussion that followed are collected in this volume, along with the lecture itself. Sartre posed the question “What is subjectivity?”—a question (...) of renewed importance today to contemporary debates concerning “the subject” in critical theory. This work includes a preface by Michel Kail and Raoul Kirchmayr and an afterword by Fredric Jameson, who makes a rousing case for the continued importance of Sartre’s philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “Personal Identity and Narrative Identity”.

Recognition and freedom function not only most prominently as a key concept in current social and political theory, notably in critical theory and in (post‐)structuralist debates as well as in pragmatic‐skeptical conceptions, but the concept also receives considerable treatment within the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition. Charles Taylor, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean‐Paul Sartre have elaborated the concept of recognition in a significant way. However, there are seminal indications for a nuanced understanding of the intrinsic relation of recognition and (un)freedom in the (...) thinking of Hans‐Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, and Martin Heidegger. A positive understanding of recognition takes its departure from the assumption that the subject can only achieve a practical self‐relation if she experiences affirmation and acceptance from Others. The negative understanding starts with the observation that existing orders of recognition force the subject to adopt given identity attributions in conformity with the system and with an effective apparatus of power. (shrink)

This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject (...) and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “The Look”.

Among the different approaches to questions of biomedical ethics, there is a view that stresses the importance of a patient’s right to make her own decisions in evaluative questions concerning her own well-being. This approach, the autonomy-based approach to biomedical ethics, has usually led to the adoption of a subjective theory of well-being on the basis of its commitment to the value of autonomy and to the view that well-being is always relative to a subject. In this article, it is (...) argued that these two commitments need not lead to subjectivism concerning the nature of well-being. (shrink)

Ricoeur’s theory of productive imagination in previously unpublished lectures. The eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur was devoted to the imagination. These previously unpublished lectures offer Ricoeur’s most significant and sustained reflections on creativity as he builds a new theory of imagination through close examination, moving from Aristotle, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant to Ryle, Price, Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Sartre. These thinkers, he contends, underestimate humanity’s creative capacity. While the Western tradition generally views imagination as derived from the reproductive example of the (...) image, Ricoeur develops a theory about the mind’s power to produce new realities. Modeled most clearly in fiction, this productive imagination, Ricoeur argues, is available across conceptual domains. His theory provocatively suggests that we are not constrained by existing political, social, and scientific structures. Rather, our imaginations have the power to break through our conceptual horizons and remake the world. (shrink)

But is not the word "metaphor" itself a metaphor, the metaphor of a displacement and therefore of a transfer in a kind of space? What is at stake is precisely the necessity of these spatial metaphors about metaphor included in our talk about "figures" of speech. . . . But in order to understand correctly the work of resemblance in metaphor and to introduce the pictorial or ironic moment at the right place, it is necessary briefly to recall the mutation (...) undergone by the theory of metaphor at the level of semantics by contrast with the tradition of classical rhetoric. In this tradition, metaphor was correctly described in terms of deviance, but this deviance was mistakenly ascribed to denomination only. Instead of giving a thing its usual common name, one designates it by means of a borrowed name, a "foreign" name in Aristotle's terminology. The rationale of this transfer of name was understood as the objective similarity between the things themselves or the subjective similarity between the attitudes linked to the grasping of these things. As concerns the goal of this transfer, it was supposed either to fill up a lexical lacuna, and therefore to serve the principle of economy which rules the endeavor of giving appropriate names to new things, new ideas, or new experiences, or to decorate discourse, and therefore to serve the main purpose of rhetorical discourse, which is to persuade and to please. Paul Ricoeur is professor of philosophy at the Université de Paris and John Nuveen Professor at the University of Chicago. He is editor of Revue de métaphysique et de morale and the author of many influential works on phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language. His most recent work to appear in English is The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. He has also contributed "Narrative Time" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

When French philosopher Paul Ricoeur died in 2005, he bequeathed to the world a highly regarded, widely influential body of work which established him as one of the greatest thinkers of our time. He also left behind a number of unfinished projects that are gathered here and translated into English for the first time. Living Up to Death consists of one major essay and nine fragments. Composed in 1996, the essay is the kernel of an unrealized book on the subject (...) of mortality. Likely inspired by his wife’s approaching death, it examines not one’s own passing but one’s experience of others dying. Ricoeur notes that when thinking about death the imagination is paramount, since we cannot truly experience our own passing. But those we leave behind do, and Ricoeur posits that the idea of life after death originated in the awareness of our own end posthumously resonating with our survivors. The fragments in this volume were written over the course of the last few months of Ricoeur’s life as his health failed, and they represent his very last work. They cover a range of topics, touching on biblical scholarship, the philosophy of language, and the idea of selfhood he first addressed in Oneself as Another. And while they contain numerous philosophical insights, these fragments are perhaps most significant for providing an invaluable look at Ricoeur’s mind at work. As poignant as it is perceptive, Living Up to Death is a moving testimony to Ricoeur’s willingness to confront his own mortality with serious questions, a touching insouciance, and hope for the future. (shrink)

_Criticism and Conviction_ offers a rare opportunity to share personally in the intellectual life and journey of the eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Internationally known for his influential works in hermeneutics, theology, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, until now, Ricoeur has been conspicuously silent on the subject of himself. In this book--a conversation about his life and work with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay--Ricoeur reflects on a variety of philosophical, social, religious, and cultural topics, from the paradoxes of political power to the (...) relationship between life and art, and life and death. In the first of eight conversations, Ricoeur traces the trajectory of his life, recounting the origins of his convictions and the development of his intellect against the tragic events of the twentieth century. Declaring himself the "son of a victim of the First World War," Ricoeur, an orphan, sketches his early years in the house of stern but loving grandparents, and the molding of his intellect under the tutelage of Roland Dalbiez, Gabriel Marcel, and André Philip. Ricoeur tells the intriguing story of his capture and five-year imprisonment by the Germans during World War II, where he and his compatriots fashioned an intellectual life complete with a library and lectures, and where he, amazingly, was able to continue his dissertation research. Elegantly interweaving anecdotal with philosophical meditations, Ricoeur recounts his relationships with some of the twentieth century's greatest figures, such as Heidegger, Jaspers, and Eliade. He also shares his views on French philosophers and explains his tumultuous relationship with Jacques Lacan. And while expressing his deepest respect for the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault, Ricoeur reserves his greatest admiration for the narratologist Algirdas Julien Greimas. Ricoeur also explores the relationship between the philosophical and religious domains, attempting to reconcile the two poles in his thought. And readers who have struggled with Ricoeur's work will be grateful for these illuminating discussions that provide an invaluable key to his writings on language and narrative, especially those on metaphor and time. Spontaneous and lively, _Criticism and Conviction_ is a passionate confirmation of Ricoeur's eloquence, lucidity, and intellectual rigor, and affirms his position as one of this century's greatest thinkers. It is an essential book for anyone interested in philosophy and literary criticism. (shrink)

In an intentionally provocative essay published in the journal Esprit (January, 1983) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, I ventured the following slogan: “Death to personalism; long live the person!” I was attempting to suggest that Mounier's formulation of personalism was, as he himself readily admitted, connected with a certain cultural and philosophical constellation which is no longer ours today: existentialism and Marxism are no longer the only opponents. They are no longer even opponents at all, against which personalism (...) would be required to define itself, at the risk of becoming one or another system or `ism'. I concluded my essay with the following citation from Mounier's Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme?: “We are witnessing [...] the first meanderings of a cyclical course where the explorations pursued to exhaustion along one path are are given up only to be rediscovered farther on, enriched by this forgetting and by the discoveries for which it cleared a path” (p. 11). In addition, I wanted to say that the person is still the most appropriate term to designate those investigations for which neither the term `con-sciousness', nor `subject', nor `individual' really apply, for the various reasons that I invoked at the time. I would like to discuss some of those investigations here, beyond the point reached in that essay, where I restricted myself to defining the person by an attitude in Eric Weil's sense, or as one would say in hermeneutics, by the everyday understanding that we have of it. Following Paul Landsberg, I used the criteria of crisis and commitment, adding to the latter certain corollaries such as fidelity over time to a higher cause, and acceptance of alterity and difference within personal identity. Now I would like to make use of contemporary investigations into language, action and narrative in order to provide the ethical constitution of the person with a substratum and roots, comparable to those explored by Emmanuel Mounier in Traité du Caractère. In this sense, the present study is an extension of Mounier's book. (shrink)

A major event in the history of twentieth-century thought, Notebooks for a Ethics is Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to develop an ethics consistent with the profound individualism of his existential philosophy. In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness , Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. Presented here (...) for the first time in English, the Notebooks reveal Sartre at his most productive, crafting a masterpiece of philosophical reflection that can easily stand alongside his other great works. Sartre grapples anew here with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. Exploring fundamental modes of relating to the Other--among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt--he articulates the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. This work thus forms an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason . The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two additional essays, one on "the good and subjectivity," the other on the oppression of blacks in the United States. With publication of David Pellauer's lucid translation, English-speaking readers will be able to appreciate this important contribution to moral philosophy and the history of ethics. Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot , and The Freud Scenario , both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

Discusses the conflict between subjective time and historical time, looks at how fiction and historical writings create a model of temporal experience, and considers the question of sense and reference.

If Descartes's Cogito can be held as the opening of the era of modern subjectivity, it is to the extent that the I is taken for the first time in the position of foundation, i.e., as the ultimate condition for the possibility of all philosophical discourse. The question raised in this paper is whether the crisis of the Cogito, opened later by Hume, Nietzsche and Heidegger on different philosophical grounds, is not already contemporaneous to the very positing of the (...) Cogito. (shrink)

This study asks how Sartre’s version of the dialectic of recognition is present in Kierkegaard’s works. For Sartre, the dialectic begins with an awareness that the other sees me and judges me. I experience this as a threat to my autonomy, and I fight back with a variety of strategies designed to mitigate the effects. Inter-subjective relationships are grounded in conflict from which there is no exit. Similarly, Kierkegaard characterizes the natural, self-centered way of seeing the other as inherently self-centered (...) and contentious. And yet some of Kierkegaard’s texts lay the ground for a way out. Unlike Sartre, he is sensitive to modifications to the structure of the dialectic of recognition that depend on a change in the basic mode of looking. That is, how I see, evaluate, and judge the other can alter the foundation of the interaction from something mutually contentious to something mutually edifying. (shrink)

Discusses the conflict between subjective time and historical time, looks at how fiction and historical writings create a model of temporal experience, and considers the question of sense and reference.

How do human beings become human? This question lies behind the so-called human sciences. But these disciplines are scattered among many different departments and hold up a cracked mirror to humankind. This is why, in the view of Paul Ricoeur, we need to develop a philosophical anthropology, one that has a much older history but still offers many untapped resources. This appeal to a specifically philosophical approach to questions regarding what it was to be human did not stop Ricoeur from (...) entering into dialogue with other disciplines and approaches, such as psychoanalysis, history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and the philosophy of language, in order to offer an up-to-date reflection on what he saw as the fundamental issues. For there is clearly not a simple, single answer to the question what is it to be human? Ricoeur therefore takes up the complexity of this question in terms of the tensions he sees between the voluntary and the involuntary, acting and suffering, autonomy and vulnerability, capacity and fragility, and identity and otherness. The texts brought together in this volume provide an overall view of the development of Ricoeurs philosophical thinking on the question of what it is to be human, from his early 1939 lecture on Attention to his remarks on receiving the Kluge Prize in 2004, a few months before his death. (shrink)

From Sartre to Levinas, continental philosophers have looked to the example of the Jew as the paradigmatic object of and model for ethical inquiry. Levinas, for example, powerfully dedicates his 1974 book Otherwise than Being to the victims of the Holocaust, and turns attention to the state of philosophy after Auschwitz. Such an ethics radically challenges prior notions of autonomy and comprehension-two key ideas for traditional ethical theory and, more generally, the Greek tradition. It seeks to respect the opacity of (...) the other and avoid the dangers of hermeneutic violence. But how does such an ethics of the other translate into real, everyday life? What is at stake in thinking the other as Jew? Is the alterity of the Jew simply a counter to Greek universalism? Is a rhetoric of exceptionalism, with its unavoidable ontological residue, at odds with shifting political realities? Within this paradigm, what then becomes of the Arab or Muslim, the other of the Jew, the other of the other, so to speak? This line of ethical thought-in its desire to bear witness to past suffering and come to terms with subjectivity after Auschwitz-arguably brackets from analysis present operations of power. Would, then, a more sensitive historical approach expose the Palestinian as the other of the Israeli? Here, Zahi Zalloua offers a challenging intervention into how we configure the contemporary. (shrink)

This study asks how Sartre’s version of the dialectic of recognition is present in Kierkegaard’s works. For Sartre, the dialectic begins with an awareness that the other sees me and judges me. I experience this as a threat to my autonomy, and I fight back with a variety of strategies designed to mitigate the effects. Inter-subjective relationships are grounded in conflict from which there is no exit. Similarly, Kierkegaard characterizes the natural, self-centered way of seeing the other as inherently self-centered (...) and contentious. And yet some of Kierkegaard’s texts lay the ground for a way out. Unlike Sartre, he is sensitive to modifications to the structure of the dialectic of recognition that depend on a change in the basic mode of looking. That is, how I see, evaluate, and judge the other can alter the foundation of the interaction from something mutually contentious to something mutually edifying. (shrink)

El siguiente ensayo busca tematizar los alcances y posibilidades de una fenomenología hermenéutica del testigo en la obra de Paul Ricoeur. Dos objetivos dan cuerpo a este intento: 1) situar el lugar del testigo en el marco de la fenomenología contemporánea, particularmente, de Husserl, Sartre y Lévinas; 2) preguntarse por la condición pasible del testigo, condición que a mí juicio hace de éste un respondiente, inscribiendo la obra ricoeuriana, con todas las cautelas correspondientes, que deben ser muchas, al inicio de (...) lo que puedo llamar el avance de diversos intentos de conducir una fenomenología de la responsividad (Jean-Louis Chrétien, Emmanuel Housset, Claude Romano), siendo cada uno de ellos, en todo caso, tan singular y original que habría que probar si son o no coincidentes. En este sentido, este ensayo es un prolegómeno a otro futuro que tendría por tarea tomar en serio a cada uno de estos fenomenólogos franceses. (shrink)

One fundamental point of agreement that emerged between Foucault and Habermas is that both rejected the Kantian paradigm of critique grounded in the notion of a transcendental subject. For Foucault, genealogy is a form of history that can account for the constitution of knowledge, discourses, etc. without reference to a constitutive subject; while central to Habermas's approach is his rejection of the "philosophy of the subject" in favor of the "intersubjectivist paradigm of communicative action". For Foucault, the end of "man;' (...) a foundational subject providing ultimate normative yardsticks, is not the creation of a deficiency but "the unfolding of a space in which it is once again possible to think". His critical work seeks "to know to what extent it is possible to think differently, rather than legitimating what is already known" ; to promote new forms of self, thought, and action, and to give impetus to the "undefined work of freedom". Yet without direction, doesn't this amount to an unrestricted notion of autonomy? Influenced perhaps by Nietzsche, Foucault calls on us to "create ourselves as a work of art", but without guidance for self-creation, aren't we left only with arbitrary choices, an "aesthetic decisionism," in which one has to take "irrationalist leaps" to affirm anything? (shrink)

Derrida's first book-length work, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy , was originally written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'etudes superieures in 1953 and 1954. Surveying Husserl's major works on phenomenology, Derrida reveals what he sees as an internal tension in Husserl's central notion of genesis, and gives us our first glimpse into the concerns and frustrations that would later lead Derrida to abandon phenomenology and develop his now famous method of deconstruction. For Derrida, the problem of genesis (...) in Husserl's philosophy is that both temporality and meaning must be generated by prior acts of the transcendental subject, but transcendental subjectivity must itself be constituted by an act of genesis. Hence, the notion of genesis in the phenomenological sense underlies both temporality and atemporality, history and philosophy, resulting in a tension that Derrida sees as ultimately unresolvable yet central to the practice of phenomenology. Ten years later, Derrida moved away from phenomenology entirely, arguing in his introduction to Husserl's posthumously published Origin of Geometry and his own Speech and Phenomena that the phenomenological project has neither resolved this tension nor expressly worked with it. The Problem of Genesis complements these other works, showing the development of Derrida's approach to phenomenology as well as documenting the state of phenomenological thought in France during a particularly fertile period, when Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran-Duc-Thao, as well as Derrida, were all working through it. But the book is most important in allowing us to follow Derrida's own development as a philosopher by tracing the roots of his later work in deconstruction to these early critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology. "A dissertation is not merely a prerequisite for an academic job. It may set the stage for a scholar's life project. So, the doctoral dissertations of Max Weber and Jacques Derrida, never before available in English, may be of more than passing interest. In June, the University of Chicago Press will publish Mr. Derrida's dissertation, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy , which the French philosopher wrote in 1953-54 as a doctoral student, and which did not appear in French until 1990. From the start, Mr Derrida displayed his inventive linguistic style and flouting of convention."--Danny Postel, Chronicle of Higher Education. (shrink)

Commenting on Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of imagination, Paul Ricoeur argues that Sartre fails to address the productive nature of imaginative acts. According to Ricoeur, Sartre's examples show that he thinks of imagination in mimetic terms, neglecting its innovative and creative dimensions. Imagination, Ricoeur continues, manifests itself most clearly in fiction, wherein new meaning is created. By using fiction as the paradigm of imaginative activity, Ricoeur is able to argue against Sartre that the essence of imagination lies not in its ability (...) to reproduce absent objects, but rather in the ability to transform reality through creative acts. Motivated by the intuition that Sartre the writer could not have forgotten to address such crucial dimensions of imagination, I examine Sartre's philosophical and literary work, showing that not only does he develop a notion of productive imagination, he also puts this notion to work by articulating the relationship between imagination, narrative, and identity formation, well before Ricoeur advanced his narrative-identity theory. I argue that Sartre, like Ricoeur and MacIntyre, another representative of narrative-theory whose criticism of Sartre I address in this essay, views imagination and narrativity as necessary conditions for the formation of a coherent and meaningful sense of self. (shrink)

Derrida's first book-length work, _The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy_, was originally written as a dissertation for his _diplôme d'études supérieures_ in 1953 and 1954. Surveying Husserl's major works on phenomenology, Derrida reveals what he sees as an internal tension in Husserl's central notion of genesis, and gives us our first glimpse into the concerns and frustrations that would later lead Derrida to abandon phenomenology and develop his now famous method of deconstruction. For Derrida, the problem of genesis in (...) Husserl's philosophy is that both temporality and meaning must be generated by prior acts of the transcendental subject, but transcendental subjectivity must itself be constituted by an act of genesis. Hence, the notion of genesis in the phenomenological sense underlies both temporality and atemporality, history and philosophy, resulting in a tension that Derrida sees as ultimately unresolvable yet central to the practice of phenomenology. Ten years later, Derrida moved away from phenomenology entirely, arguing in his introduction to Husserl's posthumously published _Origin of Geometry_ and his own _Speech and Phenomena_ that the phenomenological project has neither resolved this tension nor expressly worked with it. _The Problem of Genesis_ complements these other works, showing the development of Derrida's approach to phenomenology as well as documenting the state of phenomenological thought in France during a particularly fertile period, when Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran-Duc-Thao, as well as Derrida, were all working through it. But the book is most important in allowing us to follow Derrida's own development as a philosopher by tracing the roots of his later work in deconstruction to these early critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology. "A dissertation is not merely a prerequisite for an academic job. It may set the stage for a scholar's life project. So, the doctoral dissertations of Max Weber and Jacques Derrida, never before available in English, may be of more than passing interest. In June, the University of Chicago Press will publish Mr. Derrida's dissertation, _The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy_, which the French philosopher wrote in 1953-54 as a doctoral student, and which did not appear in French until 1990. From the start, Mr Derrida displayed his inventive linguistic style and flouting of convention."—Danny Postel, _Chronicle of Higher Education _. (shrink)

Although the topic of emotions was long ignored in British and American analytic philosophy and psychology, it remained a rich and exciting subject in Continental Philosophy. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche celebrated the passionate life. In phenomenology Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean‐Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Gabriel Marcel, and Paul Ricoeur all made major contributions. Heidegger pursued a highly original thesis concerning the vital role of moods in human life, notably angst and boredom. Jean‐Paul Sartre added the tantalizing thesis that our (...) emotions are strategies to help us cope with the difficulties in life. Max Scheler gave us the stunning expression, “the emotional a priori,” the idea that emotions are basic structures of human existence. In this essay, I want to expand on the contributions of the classic phenomenologists and existentialists and do more of what they were doing by way of an “original” project of phenomenological investigation. (This follows publication of the first two volumes of a three‐part study of the emotions, Not Passion's Slave and In Defense of Sentimentality, both published by Oxford University Press.). (shrink)

We examine an article of Paul Ricoeur on autonomy and vulnerability. Ricoeur presents the two notions in the field of justice as intricately woven into each other. He analyzes their interdependence on three levels of human agency. Ricoeur’s exposition has a focus on judicial judgment. After presenting Ricoeur’s argument and an analysis of his main points, the author argues that Ricoeur’s reflection lines up with some essential intentions of care ethics. Ricoeur’s contribution to care ethics is given in a delicate (...) balance of autonomy and its vulnerability. (shrink)

This new study of modern educational thought relates the selected thinkers and theories to a profound change in the way in which men have come to understand themselves and the world. The theories of Rousseau, Kant, Froebel, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche contemporary English-speaking philosophers and schemes of education, Sartre, Helvetius and B.F. Skinner, are shown, in separate studies, to be variations upon the theme of man as a self-defining and self-legislating subject in a world that does nothing to present him with (...) any Law or Way. Education therefore becomes a problem, a matter of arbitrary selection of what the young are to be taught and to do. (shrink)

This volume examines the complex dialogue between German Idealism and phenomenology, two of the most important movements in Western philosophy. Twenty-four newly authored chapters by an international group of well-known scholars examine the shared concerns of these two movements; explore how phenomenologists engage with, challenge, and critique central concepts in German Idealism; and argue for the continuing significance of these ideas in contemporary philosophy and other disciplines. Chapters cover not only the work of major figures such as Husserl, Heidegger, and (...) Merleau-Ponty, but a wide range of philosophers who build on the phenomenological tradition, including Fanon, Gadamer, and Levinas. These essays highlight key themes of the nature of subjectivity, the role of intersubjectivity, the implications for ethics and aesthetics, the impact of time and history, and our capacities for knowledge and understanding. Key features: · Critically engages two of the major philosophical movements of the last 250 years · Draws on the insights of those movements to address contemporary issues in ethics, theory of knowledge, and political philosophy · Expands the range of idealist and phenomenological themes by considering them in the context of gender, postcolonial theory, and environmental concerns, as well as their global reach · Includes new contributions from prominent, international scholars in these fields This Handbook is essential reading for all scholars and advanced students of phenomenology and German Idealism. With chapters on Beauvoir, Sartre, Scheler, Schutz, Stein, and Ricoeur, The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology is also ideal for scholars researching these important figures in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Failure, success's ugly sister, is inevitable - cognitively, biologically and morally. We all make mistakes, we all die, and we all get it wrong. A chain of flaws can be traced through all phenomena, natural and human. We see impending and actual failures in individual lives, in marriages, careers, in religion, education, psychotherapy, business, nations, and in entire civilizations. And there are chronic and imperceptible failures in everyday domains that most of the time we barely notice, often until it is (...) too late. Colin Feltham expores what constitutes failure across a number of domains. He takes guidance from the work of such diverse philosophers and thinkers as Diogenes, Epictetus, Augustine, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Cioran and Ricoeur, while also drawing on the insights of artists and writers such as van Gogh, Arthur Miller, Philip Larkin, Samuel Beckett, Charles Bukowski and Philip Roth. Precursors and partial synonyms for failure can be seen in the concepts of hamartia, sin, fallenness, non-being, false consciousness and anthropathology. Philosophy can help us but is itself, in its reliance on language and logic, subject to inherent flaws and failures. It is the very pervasiveness yet common denial of failure which makes it a compelling topic that cries out for honest analysis. We live in a time when the cliche of failed Marxism may be segueing frighteningly into the failure of 'selfish capitalism', in a time of geopolitical uncertainty and failure to address the dire need for agreement and action on climate change. But many of us are also painfully aware of our own shortcomings, our own weakness of will and lack of authenticity. Trying to identify where the lines may be drawn between individual responsibility, social policy, and historical and biological dark forces is a key challenge in this fascinating book. (shrink)

Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition: A Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity presents Ricoeur’s work from the beginning to its end in form of a cultural theory and proposes a cultural hermeneutic that clarifies the cultural facilitation in a person’s process of attaining a sense of being a human. This exploration of human being as profoundly formed and influenced by the cultural condition also enables a new understanding of intercultural questions by revealing the common human condition that the various cultures manifest.

_The Subject in Question_ provides a fascinating insight into a debate between two of the twentieth century's most famous philosophers - Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Husserl - over the key notions of conscious experience and the self. Sartre's _The Transcendence of the Ego_, published in 1937, is a major text in the phenomenological tradition and sets the course for much of his later work. _The Subject in Question_ is the first full-length study of this famous work and its influence on (...) twentieth-century philosophy. It also investigates the relationship between Sartre's ideas and the earlier work of Descartes and Kant. (shrink)

The political actions of Martin Heidegger raise a compelling question to those concerned with philosophy: How was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century willing to ally himself with Nazism and what does this mean for philosophy? This question has been raised and brushed aside from the end of the Second World War, when Heidegger was formally accused for his involvement with Hitler's regime and forbidden to attain any official teaching position henceforth. Important thinkers, like his colleague (...) and friend in the pre-war years, Karl Jaspers. testified then against him. But Heidegger's fame rose again above his indignity in the 1950s, when Hannah Arendt in the USA and Jean-Paul Sartre in France, among others, began once again to spread the word of his philosophy and translate his works. These problems have recently intensified after the posthumous publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) in 2014, containing his notes from 1931-1941. Their publication caused seismic tremors in the field of philosophy, with Heidegger's opponents considering themselves finally vindicated by his own pen, and his supporters trying to separate thinking from actual life. However, the influence of Heidegger's thought - as well as that of other representatives of German anti-humanist nationalistic conservatism, such as Oswald Spengler - continues to spread, not only in academic but also in broader social and political circles. In the face of this spreading influence, which is combined with the influence of some disciples such as Nick Land or Giorgio Agamben, a biographical-type confrontation is not enough. We should confront Heidegger directly at the core of his philosophy. We cannot afford to ignore him or bury him under superficial gossip. Instead, we should confront him philosophically. We might be able to clear the ground for such a confrontation, if we resort to the philosophical concepts of autonomy, temporality, and human freedom. In my opinion, the most important philosophical challenge to Heideggerian thought, in this context, has been expressed by Cornelius Castoriadis. In the following chapters, I will argue in favor of this position, outlining the Castoriadian philosophy of time in contrast to the Heideggerian and highlighting the main points of their opposition. The book is divided into two parts. Part one, "Castoriadis against Heidegger" deals with the basic concepts and arguments of both philosophers around human existence, the individual, society, and temporality. We start by presenting Heidegger's scandal in the social-historical context but also with the help of Hannah Arendt's last assessment of the thinker. We move on to outline the basic concepts and structures of Heidegger's philosophical thinking in parallel with Castoriadis' criticism as regards politics, ontology and technoscience. Part two, "Time and existence" first examines the relevant approaches of Lukacs and Ricoeur in comparison to Heidegger and Castoriadis, to elucidate the basic concept of temporality and then presents an outline of Castoriadis' insights on time and existence, before finally applying these concepts to contemporary social-historical phenomena that redefine and transform human existence and social temporalities, like space exploration, digital cyberspaces and online communications. //////// -/- "This book is a tour de force that excites those who agree or disagree with the philosophy of Heidegger. With clarity and sophistication, Schismenos revives the public debate to reveal the rich possibilities for another world. A must-read for everyone interested in a philosophy that matters." - VASILIS KOSTAKIS - Professor of P2P Governance at Tallinn University of Technology and Faculty Associate at Harvard University -/- . (shrink)

J. N. (Jitendra Nath) Mohanty (1928–2023). -/- Professor J. N. Mohanty has characterized his life and philosophy as being both “inside” and “outside” East and West, i.e., inside and outside traditions of India and those of the West, living in both India and United States: geographically, culturally, and philosophically; while also traveling the world: Melbourne to Moscow. Most of his academic time was spent teaching at the University of Oklahoma, The New School Graduate Faculty, and finally Temple University. Yet his (...) preeminent work in Husserlian phenomenology developed alongside his eminent work in Indian philosophy: describing his interests as “a fusion of disparate horizons.” -/- J. N. Mohanty was born September 26, 1928, in Cuttack (Odisha, East India). After graduating from high school, he went on to study both Indian and Western philosophy in Calcutta, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. There he read Whitehead and Kant’s First Critique; although he wanted to include mathematics in his curriculum, he was led instead to include Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. On the shelves of his teacher, Ras Vihar Das, he came upon a copy of the English translation (Ideas I, 1931) of Edmund Husserl’s classic Ideen I (1913), which presented Husserl’s ground-breaking conception of phenomenology. In 1952–1954 he left India for the first time, reaching Göttingen to study mathematics and philosophy, which earned him a doctorate in mathematics and “philosophy of mathematical sciences” (in his own words). In Göttingen, Mohanty found the powerful mathematical world that Husserl himself had earlier interacted with, where several Husserl students had formed the Göttingen school of phenomenology. During these years Mohanty studied primarily mathematics, alongside Kant and also Vedic Sanskrit. From his friend Günter Patzig, interpreter of Aristotle and Frege, Mohanty was drawn to Frege in relation to mathematical logic. He attended lectures of Heidegger, intrigued by his ontological thinking. Yet, despite the Husserlian legacy, Mohanty was completely self-taught in his studies of Husserl (as he has reported). With a doctorate in mathematics, and ideas from Kant and Frege in his philosophical background, Mohanty set about crafting his own conception of philosophy grounded in phenomenology, drawing on Husserl’s extensive work, critically sifting through Husserl’s texts and their emerging concepts of intentionality, meaning, subject, intersubjectivity, and world. In between he wrote his first book-length study: on phenomenological insights in Nicolai Hartmann and A. N. Whitehead (1958). -/- Over many decades Mohanty formulated and argued, in analytical detail, for a conception of phenomenology and its place in philosophy, later presented in a clear and concise book titled Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account (1989). Over these very decades the same scholar explored classical and recent Indian philosophy, thinking through kindred ideas of consciousness, self, and knowledge drawn from the Indian philosophical contexts. While writing on Nyāya theory of truth, he also pondered whether the world and finite individual are illusory or real, and whether Marx, Arendt, Gandhi (whom he heard speak in Calcutta), or Vinoba Bhave (with whom he marched across India for the land-grant movement) could best navigate post-Independent India’s social and svarāj or self-rule reforms. The two Mohantys, thinking through a vision of self and world, turned out to be “non-different” or “non-dual” as they each practiced critical phenomenology from both inside and outside the respective philosophical and cultural traditions. Numerous students, fellows, and colleagues or collaborators have benefited immensely from this infusion and unified approach to diversity in philosophical thought. In the 2000s, moving into retirement, Mohanty wrote two long books devoted to his understanding of Husserl and phenomenology and the calling of philosophy itself. This two-volume study shows Mohanty himself thinking through Husserl, critically, in The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Introduction (2008), and Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938. As Mohanty worked on Husserl, he carefully indicated where he agreed and where he rejected or changed ideas, all part of his practice in phenomenology of “description and interpretation.” It was the same pattern he used in addressing the thought of Husserl vis-à-vis Kant or Frege or even Quine. -/- As Mohanty developed his understanding of phenomenology over the years, he wrote books on theory of meaning and the concept of intentionality, developing a model of ideal meaning and its foundation in intentionality, drawing on Husserl’s results. He followed these with the book Husserl and Frege (1982), linking the thought of those foundational figures for the “continental” and “analytic” traditions, respectively, in twentieth-century Western philosophy. Over his long career Mohanty addressed both traditions in his clear and accessible writing style. While developing his views on phenomenology, Mohanty regularly looked to “Husserl and his others,” evaluating views in Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and then Derrida and others in the wake of Husserl. With his background in Kant, Mohanty also looked toward Heidegger and Hegel in relation to Husserl’s later work in the Crisis (1935–38). Similarly, he looked to contemporary analytic philosophers, adjudicating his own, oft-wise Husserlian views in relation to Frege, Nagel, and others. Amid his active scholarly career, Mohanty co-founded the journal Husserl Studies, and was editorial advisor to Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Philosophy East & West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Sophia, among others. -/- Yet all this while Mohanty was also thinking and writing about Indian philosophy and its relation to phenomenology. In his own retrospective, Indian philosophy is “the permanent background” of his Husserlian thinking, while Kant is the recurrent Western background of his Husserlian phenomenology. Mohanty’s form of “transcendental phenomenology” evolved, in his own perspective, against the background of his studies of Navya-Nyāya on logic and Vedānta on consciousness, in Indian philosophy, and against the background of Kant’s First Critique on the transcendental, in Western philosophy. Accordingly, Mohanty’s study of logical form and of the intentionality of consciousness seeks a fusion of East and West in the conception of transcendental phenomenology. (Cf. Mohanty’s apt response to critics in The Empirical and the Transcendental (2000).) Even in the context of North American Husserl scholarship, Mohanty has exercised an earnest fusion of East and West. For the so-called East Coast and West Coast interpretations of Husserl’s crucial notion of noema both find a sympathetic spirit in J. N. Mohanty’s careful and nuanced interpretation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. With Mohanty the two faces of the noema are the logical (Fregean) and the phenomenal (Kantian), and these views of intentional structure join in consciousness—in a way resonant with Indian thought. -/- - David Woodruff Smith (UC Irvine) and Purushottama Bilimoria (SFSU, San Francisco; University of Melbourne) -/- For photo of Prof Mohanty visit APA online memorial_minutes2023 Courtesy of APA Memorial Minutes (& Proceedings) 2023 . (shrink)

In this essay, Domenico Jervolino summarizes twenty years of Ricoeur’s reading of Patočka’s work, up to the Neapolitan conference of 1997. Nowhere is Ricoeur closer to Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology. Both thinkers belong, together with authors like Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, to a third phase of the phenomenological movement, marked by the search for a new approach to the relation between human beings and world, beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In the search for this approach, Patočka strongly underlines the relation between body, temporality (...) and sociality. Central to this new encounter of Patočka and Ricoeur is the discovery of an idea of inter-human community based on a a-subjective conception of existence. (shrink)

Although the topic of emotions was long ignored in British and American analytic philosophy and psychology, it remained a rich and exciting subject in Continental Philosophy. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche celebrated the passionate life. In phenomenology Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean‐Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Gabriel Marcel, and Paul Ricoeur all made major contributions. Heidegger pursued a highly original thesis concerning the vital role of moods in human life, notably angst and boredom. Jean‐Paul Sartre added the tantalizing thesis that our (...) emotions are strategies to help us cope with the difficulties in life. Max Scheler gave us the stunning expression, “the emotional a priori,” the idea that emotions are basic structures of human existence. In this essay, I want to expand on the contributions of the classic phenomenologists and existentialists and do more of what they were doing by way of an “original” project of phenomenological investigation. (This follows publication of the first two volumes of a three‐part study of the emotions, Not Passion's Slave and In Defense of Sentimentality, both published by Oxford University Press.). (shrink)

This article is an attempt to discuss Dooyeweerd’s epistemology in the light of German Idealism. First, a characterization of the thought of Kant and Fichte is offered, focusing in particular on three themes: normativity, autonomy and reflexivity. Second, Dooyeweerd’s criticisms of Kant and Fichte are reviewed, and it is argued that, in both cases, Dooyeweerd focuses in on a central paradox that he seeks in his own thought to avoid. Third, Dooyeweerd’s epistemology is examined and it is argued that, not (...) only does his thought exhibit the primary themes of Idealist thought discussed previously, but that it falls into the same apparent paradox as do Kant and Fichte. Finally, the paradox itself is examined and a way forward for Reformational thought is suggested, by analogy with Fichte’s inter-subjective turn. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criticism, Imagination, and the Subjectivization of AestheticsRoger W. H. SavageThe growing discontent with reductivist practices signals a new current in contemporary criticism's understanding of music, literature and art. George Levine's unease with critics who are unable or unwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with literary texts they expose as "imperialist, sexist, homophobic and racist" illumines the contradiction fueling the reduction of aesthetics to ideology.1 Cultural studies that deploy (...) literature as evidence of the aesthetics' socio-historical substance mask literature's capacity to break open new perspectives on reality by assuming that literary works are politically complicit with the aesthetics' strategic "mystification of the status quo" (A&I, p. 3). Criticism's indifference to its philosophical presuppositions exacerbates the paradox of denouncing a body of works that constitute criticism's aesthetic and intellectual heritage. According to Mario Valdés, literary studies' coming of age mandates that criticism take account of a tradition nurtured by a succession of philosophers including Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.2 For Valdés, the post-structuralist realization that literary texts are indeterminate and inexhaustible prohibits replacing the work of art with critical commentaries on it; criticism's collective and determining role belongs to a shared community of commentary whose history and thought is a record of the changing interpretations and understandings of literary texts' meanings. [End Page 164]Valdés's claim extends to the field of contemporary music criticism, where the fashion of denouncing aesthetics as socially pernicious turns against traditional musicology's institutional authority. By demystifying absolute music (instrumental music devoid of programmatic associations), a self-proclaimed critical musicology revolts against traditional musicology's perceived political and ideological agenda. Critical musicology militates against the aesthetic conceit that absolute music transcends its social construction. Yet, by overlooking the philosophical presuppositions that set music's autonomy against practical affairs, new musicology accedes to the schema it recoils against.The tradition nurtured by Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology represents a critical current whose significance has been overshadowed by postmodernist investments in decoding music's social and political content. Gadamer's critique of the subjectivization of aesthetics and Ricoeur's meditations on the imagination's capacity for invention offer an alternativeto contemporary music criticism's reaction against the principle of music's aesthetic autonomy. Gadamer and Ricoeur question art's formal separation from reality, which belongs to the history of Kant's radical subjectivization of aesthetics. Gadamer's critique of art's aesthetic differentiation prepares the ground for revealing how socially informed analyses conform to the schema Kant initiates by divorcing judgments of taste from their surrounding cultural ethos. Gadamer argues that, by discrediting theoretical knowledge that does not rely on the methodology of the natural sciences, the transcendental function Kant ascribes to aesthetic judgment lays the foundation for differentiating between art's aesthetic constitution and a concept of truth that accommodates the standard of the natural sciences. Through reducing the "sensus communis to a subjective principle," Kant legitimates his critique of aesthetic judgments by denying taste any importanceas a mode of knowledge.3Ricoeur's hermeneutical reflections on imagination complement Gadamer's critique of a differentiating consciousness that abstracts art works from their cultural worlds. For Ricoeur, imagination is productive when the fictions that works create affect our understanding of ourselves and our world by re-describing reality. Aesthetics' alignment with ideology encounters a limit in the power works evince by unfolding different ways of seeing or hearing reality. Ricoeur's reflections on imagination stand in stark contrast to the idea that individual works represent a form of cultural capital in the struggle for social position [End Page 165] and power. Contemporary critical practices' failure to account for the philosophical separation of judgments of taste from knowledge of reality precipitates the impasse criticism encounters when it identifies aesthetics with ideology at the expense of a work's capacity to affect reality in productive ways. The dispersal and potential disappearance of music's aesthetic character into the recesses of cultural and political analysis keeps step with the conceptual narrowing imposed by a restrictive sociological critique. Demystifying music's ideological representations of gender, race and identity purges romantic... (shrink)

_The Universal_ proposes a radically new philosophical system that moves from ontology to ethics. Drawing on the work of De Beauvoir, Sartre, and Le Doeuff, among others, and addressing a range of topics from the Asian sex trade to late capitalism, quantum gravity, and Merleau-Ponty's views on cinema, Dorothea Olkowski stretches the mathematical, political, epistemological, and aesthetic limits of continental philosophy and introduces a new perspective on political structures. Straddling a course between formalism and conventionalism, Olkowski develops the concept of (...) an ontological unconscious that arises from our "sensible" relation to the world-the information we absorb and emit that affects our encounters with the environment and others. In this "realm of the senses," or the field of vulnerability defined by our experience with pleasure and pain, Olkowski is able to rethink the space-time relations put forth by Irigaray's notion of the "interval," Bergson's "recollection," Merleau-Ponty's idea of the "flesh," and Deleuze's "plane of immanence." This aesthetic sense is shared by all humankind and nonhuman entities in the organic and inorganic world. The sensible universal can be applied to categories of pure and practical reason; experiential binaries of male-female and subject-object; and issues of autonomy, moral laws, and the regulation of perception. (shrink)

The main theme of the essay is the bodily nature of human existence according to Sartre. I will try to place Sartre’s account of bodily existence into the special context of phenomenological reduction. Though Sartre was rather skeptical toward this methodological operation as it was presented by Edmund Husserl, I have in mind the wider interpretation of reductions that was given by Jean-Luc Marion. According to Marion the phenomenological reduction means the focusing of the philosophical regard onto a special field (...) of phenomena, an operation that could be radicalized. In Marion’s interpretation the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger belonged to the very same movement of philosophy, as two different phases, which involved a third phase.. I tried to show that Sartre’s phenomenology could be shown in this perspective, as a reduction to the bodily human existence. With this reduction Sartre opened a field of phenomena that had a fundamental importance to the French phenomenological tradition. (shrink)