Cover of Phenomenology 2010
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Displaying: 41-60 of 125 documents


41. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 3
José Ruiz Fernández La crítica de Natorp a Husserl y la asunción de un uso conceptual fenomenológico indicativo en las primeras lecciones de Heidegger
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This paper begins by summarizing the critique that Natorp directed towards Husserl’s conception of phenomenology. It can be considered that this critique has two major moments. First, it is a critique against the assumption that immediate life can be treated as an immanent “fi eld” or “region” that can be known in reflection. Second, it is a critique against the assumption that the logos that gives an accurate account of immediate life, that is, the original phenomenological logos, has to take the form of a conceptual description: since every concept seems to operates an abstraction of concrete life, it seems problematic how an eidetic categorical analysis could safeguard the original reality of immediate life; in other words, it seems problematic that such an operative logos could be considered the original accomplishment of phenomenology. Heidegger acknowledged the depth of Natorp’s critical remarks and understood that they involved a real methodological problem for an accurate understanding of the phenomenological endeavour. This paper tries to clarify how the assumption of an indicative character of meaningful distinctions can overcome Natorp’s critique. To assume the indicative character of a meaningful distinction means, here, to operate with distinctions in such a way that their original dependence on concrete factual life is acknowledged, in other words, to use distinctions assuming that they are carried out for the sake of that which does not involve the categorical form of the meaningful distinction and, therefore, to use distinctions, not for their own sake, but in order to remit or indicate that concrete reality which precedes them. This paper defends also that the consequent assumption of the indicative character of meaningful distinctions is to lead to a new and more genuine understanding of phenomenology and how the phenomenological endeavour is to be carried out. Finally, this paper tries to show that this important motive is really present in Heidegger’s first lessons in Freiburg. Nevertheless, the paper also points out that the original understanding of phenomenology that this motive had to open, was soon miscarried. In Heidegger’s thought, the indicative character of philosophical concepts is not fully assumed. That motive is entangled with other irreconcilable elements that end up ruining the original possibilities that it should have contributed to unveil. These distorting elements, which ultimately prevail in Heidegger’s philosophy, are what make up for Heidegger’s theory of formal indications and for his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology.
42. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 3
Agustín Serrano de Haro Is Pain an Intentional Experience?
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My paper focuses on the main categories that phenomenology has employed to describe physical pain. I try to show that the early assumption of Stumpf`s concept of “affective sensations” (Gefühlempfindungen) faced strong descriptive difficulties, that seem to point to a sort of noematic character of pain: pain in its bodily location is the pole of a central attention, or at least of a conscious co-attention. But at the same time it is impossible to avoid the evidence that pain consciousness is not a perceptive grasp of one’s body, but a feeling of instantaneous or continuous hurting. The provisional thesis may be that the three main categories of Husserlian analysis of intentionality: hyletic layer, noetic intention, and noematic kern are needed in the basic description of pain experience, but they are required without any internal division—and this is the very core of the problem.
43. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 3
Urbano Mestre Sidoncha A invesigaçao da subjectividade psicossomática como tarefa essencial da fenomenologia
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Bridging the gap between phenomenology, namely, husserlian’s phenomenology, and concrete and everyday issues such as the mind/body problem comes now to light as the chief driving force in this paper. Showing that this called for connection was to be written within, and not beyond, the field of transcendental phenomenology, worked for us as the guideline that shaped all further steps and decisions. To accomplish this, we attended to some of the mains thesis developed by Edmund Husserl in the second book of his Ideen, in an attempt to trace the signs that bears witness to a plan where not only phenomenology has the required expertise for dealing the problem, but a plan which is also responsible for the production of this new and distinctive evaluation which, by it self, should put together a better version of a less puzzling problem.
44. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 3
Nicoleta Szabo The Dark Face of Praxis and Enlarged Pragmatism: Alfred Schütz and Wong Kar-wai
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The problem of the action’s meaning for the agent that executes it constitutes a complicated matter in terms of a phenomenology of action. Our task in this paper is to analyze the acts of consciousness that contribute to the constitution of this meaning, underlying two shortcomings with which Alfred Schütz struggled: the teleocratic character of the action’s project and, respectively, the “radical or vulgar” pragmatism, which represents the ordinary frame of reference for a pragmatic theory of action. The solutions proposed by Schütz—the “praxial” aspect of the ongoing deed, the importance of imposed relevances and a different understanding of pragmatism—will be scrutinized using a short case study occasioned by some interesting remarks of the film director Wong Kar-wai regarding his way of making films without a proper project.
45. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 3
Panos Theodorou Heidegger’s Search for a Phenomenological Fundamental Ontology in his 1919 WS, vis-a-vis the Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Values
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It has already been remarked that Heidegger’s early Kriegsnotsemester of 1919 plays an important role in the development of his project toward a phenomenological Fundamental Ontology, which would elucidate the meaning of “Being as such.” However, both the reason why this happens and why it eventually fails appear to have been poorly understood. In this paper, I initially present the meaning of Heidegger’s effort, in that ‘semester,’ to build philosophy as a genuinely “primordial science.” Then, I explain the sense in which the neo-Kantian philosophy of values became a crucial constituent of his inspiration. In this direction, Heidegger’s thought experiment with the “African aboriginal” is examined and placed at the right position within his overall search for the “primal some thing” qua critical “formal indication” in the search and phenomenologization of “Being as such.” Finally, I present three serious difficulties that make this early attempt by Heidegger phenomenologically flawed and probably lead him to the new orientations of Being and Time.
46. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Lester Embree Introduction to Volume 5 (continued): Phenomenology beyond Philosophy
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47. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Gary Backhaus Bioregionalism: Identification and Orientation as a Problem of Scale
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The thesis of this article maintains that identification and orientation are necessary existential modalities for the concretization of Heidegger’s notion of poetic dwelling. An equivocation of “place” and “region” foils bioregional polity due to differences in scale and human limits for place-presence. The solution advocated in this article is the creation of a form of life to be taken up by a bioregional advisory board. The goal of these bioregionalists would be to achieve identification and orientation in a variety of places within a region so that the networking required for bioregional polity would gain an experiential basis.
48. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
W. S. K. Cameron Socrates Outside Athens: Plato, the Phadrus, and the Possibility of “Dialogue” with Nature
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Environmental ethics has long struggled with a dilemma: many mistrust as “anthropocentric” our judgments about the values of non-human nature, but it is unclear how we could make, let alone justify, “biocentric” judgments; and recent worries that the world is linguistically constituted only exacerbate the threat of skepticism. Happily, Plato’s Phaedrus gives some indication of how a “dialogue” with nature might proceed. But since Plato’s confidence in the forms is likely irrecoverable, I turn to Gadamer for an account of the language-world relation that allows us to concede the world’s linguistic constitution while still acknowledging the possibility of nature’s dialogue with us.
49. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Alberto J. L. Carrillo Canan, May Zindel Digital Image and Cinema
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The new Hollywood digital cinema centered in spectacularity on the basis of computer graphics, has driven the filmmakers to work with tecnoscientific teams concentrating in the total control of the image and it is just the predominance of the image that tends to simplify the cinematographic plots. This simplification seems to reject the old idea that cinema is “about telling stories through images,” instead it emancipates the image from the narrative. This goes hand in hand with a new sensibility that disregards the narrative and is centered in entertainment, regardless of the complaints made by intellectuals. With this, the new digital spectacular cinema reopens under new conditions a fundamental poetological polemic that had already a background in the debate about abstract painting and figurative painting: what are the specific possibilities of each media.
50. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Scott D. Churchill “Second Person” Perspectivity in Observing and Understanding Emotional Expression
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This paper explores the “intentional layering” within an emotional experience that was examined in a qualitative research class devoted to “depth phenomenology.” The idea was to approach qualitative data as a starting point for delving more deeply into an experience than a research participant might originally have been able to go. We begin by examining the method of access by means of which the discovery of this “layering” was made. In remaining faithful to Husserl, we shall talk about doing phenomenology from within the intersubjective relation and shall reflect upon what, precisely, are the “affairs” to which Husserl invites us to return.
51. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Maureen Connolly Constructing a Curriculum of Place: Embedding Meaningful Movement in Mundane Activities for Children and Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
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Embedding meaningful movement into mundane activities is a scholarly project based in over a decade of focused, systematic observations of children and youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and semiotic phenomenology have been used in the development of a movement curriculum which honors the lived experiences and stressed embodiments of the children and youth with ASD. The blended analysis strategies are described and discussed as are their applications to pedagogy and theorizing.
52. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Thomas D. Craig How to Make a Photograph within the In/Visible World of Autism
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Framing the world with a camera is a phenomenological and semiotic challenge both for documentary photography and research in lived experience. The skilled practice of photography itself can benefit from cross-fertilization with Communicology and its commitment to understanding the constitutive relations of visual givens and expressive bodies as mediated by the perception of cultural signs and codes (Connolly, Lanigan, and Craig, 2005). Communicology also can help to negotiate the perpetual lure of perceptual faith and its offer of some clever aperture providing access to the things themselves. In this essay I will describe the experience of phenomenologically-based research photography within a two week summer camp for children and youth with autism. Taking a clue from artist-professor Victor Burgin (1982) on commonplace photographic practice as the magnification of the natural attitude “viewed through a lens,” I will discuss the assumptions and pitfalls of “smiling for the camera” in the extreme contexts of autism. As I will show, Communicology can help to navigate through the idealist temptation to treat individual consciousness as an abstract object of inquiry as well as the pretense of capturing neutral objects at a distance.
53. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Steen Halling Psychology and the Eclipse of Forgiveness
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This chapter, which is based upon empirical phenomenological studies of the experience of forgiving a significant other, details the process people go through as they move from injury to forgiveness. Forgiveness is characterized not just by letting go of anger and resentment but as a movement of compassion toward the injurer and an opening up of a new future in one’s own life. Thus phenomenology reveals that the experience of forgiveness highlights our capacity for transcendence and demonstrates that forgiveness is a discovery rather an action requiring a conscious decision. This portrait of forgiveness is contrasted with traditional psychological studies that eclipse these key features of this phenomenon.
54. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Mark A. Hector, Judith E. Hector Walt Whitman, Nursing, and Phenomenology
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Each age has its sick and wounded and those who provide them nursing care. This paper links together “The Wound Dresser,” a poem by the Civil War nurse Walt Whitman, a musical composition by John Adams that is based on the poem, and a book on nursing research and practice. The poem, the musical composition, and the book are described and related from the perspective of phenomenology.
55. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Hwa Yol Jung Vaclav Havel’s New Statecraft of Responsible Politics
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Vaclav Havel is a playwright who turned into a statesman of extraordinary courage, wisdom, and morals by the exigency of his time. He has been the most prominent voice in post-Communist Eastern Europe. His close fellow-traveller was Jan Patočka who was a student of Husserl and Heidegger, and closely read the phenomenological ethicist Emmanuel Levinas who earmarked dialogical ethics as “first philosophy.” Havel’s signature essay “living in truth” marks the heart of his morality in politics, that is, the confluence of morality and politics. For him, politics as “the art of the impossible” defies politics as “the art of the possible” or Realpolitik. Responsibility as “first politics” is a moral alternative to violence whose ultimate telos is to destroy the Other.
56. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Chris Nagel Exposure, Absorption, Subjection—Being-in-Media
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In the Introduction to Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, he argues for the relevance of the book’s subtitle, “The Extensions of Man.” Specifically, McLuhan claims that media—that is, electronic media—are extensions of the human nervous system, permitting a range of contexts, contacts, and experiences. To clarify what this means, I develop a phenomenological interpretation of media as existential, lived situation, drawing from McLuhan’s own account while critically analyzing it, and bringing into play the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Our being-in-media may be as decisive for us as McLuhan seems to have thought, but may also be far better characterized by exposure, absorption, or subjection than by McLuhan’s optimism.
57. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Lori K. Schneider Local Workers, Global Workplace, and the Experience of Place
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This paper presents selected findings from a hermeneutic phenomenological study of how remote workers in global corporations experience and interpret local place. The research was based on Heidegger’s thinking about space, place and dwelling, Giddens’ conception of globalization as “time-space distanciation,” research on remote work, and concepts from architectural theory. The eight study participants were knowledge workers in the United States and Europe who work full time from home as employees of three large global corporations. In this paper I share several insights about remote workers’ rich and varied lived experience of place. Key findings include the importance of managing the threshold between work and home and the need to create spaces for interaction at work. Some remote workers learn to shape, choose, or create places that better suit them, while others prefer to remain in place. Those remote workers who find that working at home brings opportunities to become more deeply involved in their local communities may ultimately help communities become more globally-connected while retaining unique local qualities. This research suggests that the essential phenomenological nature of place is both spatial and temporal. A place is a specific location within physical space that acquires personal meaning, arising from a person’s past history and evolving with ongoing or repeated experience. Individuals make meaning of place as Center (groundedness or rootedness), Setting (activity, convenience or purpose), and Source (generativity, inspiration or transcendence). Each facet of place experience contains, reflects, and tends toward the others; all contribute to the meanings of place. We shape and respond to places based on these lived meanings; places shape us as our lives take place within them.
58. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
David Seamon Gaston Bachelard’s Topoanalysis in the 21st Century: The Lived Reciprocity between Houses and Inhabitants as Portrayed by American Writer Louis Bromfield
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This article contributes to phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard’s call for topoanalysis by examining houses and inhabitation depicted in two works by American writer Louis Bromfield (1896-1956). The first work considered is “The Hands of God,” a 1939 short story that recounts the defilement of a 300-year-old Basque farmhouse. The second work considered is Bromfield’s last novel, the 1951 Mr. Smith, which depicts the unraveling, pre-World-War-II home life of Wolcott Ferris, a conventional Midwestern, middle-class husband and father. These two works demonstrate how, regularly in his creative efforts, Bromfield depicted a lived reciprocity whereby house and inhabitants mutually sustain and reflect each other, sometimes in positive ways that facilitate engagement and care; at other times, in negative ways that intimate or spur personal or social dissolution. The article concludes by considering implications for phenomenological research on houses and homes in the 21st century. The argument is made that, on one hand, inhabitation involves a lived whole unified by its total character. On the other hand, inhabitation involves a lived dialectic founded in a twofold significance involving internal diversity versus external connectedness. In both these inner and outer relationships, there are “sustaining” and “undermining” situations—e.g., the home as a place of comfort and regeneration versus the home as a place of unease, vulnerability, or conflict. Most broadly, the perspective argued for here looks inward toward the uniqueness of particular homes and inhabitations but also recognizes that they are integrally related outwardly to the world beyond, including other places, the broader societal context, and global interconnectedness.
59. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
M. Reza Shirazi The Fragile Phenomenology of Juhani Pallismaa
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This essay argues that Finnish architect and phenomenologist Juhani Pallasmaa’s way of architectural understanding involves what might be called a “fragile phenomenology,” by which is meant a style of phenomenological interpretation that is contextual and multi-sensory. Pallasmaa’s fragile phenomenology moves beyond the hegemony of vision to enrich the presence of the body by giving attention to lived experience and replacing one-dimensional vision by multi-sensory perception. This article provides an overview and preliminary critique of Pallasmaa’s fragile phenomenology by evaluating his interpretation of architect Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea (1938-39). The article concludes that Pallasmaa’s style of architectural understanding largely involves a “phenomenology from within.” In regard to the Villa Mairea, for example, we gain an in-depth phenomenological understanding of many architectural aspects of the building, though we gain a less clear understanding of the building as a whole and of its lived relationship with site and surroundings.
60. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 2
Dennis E. Skocz Keynesian Phenomenology and the Meltdown
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The paper aims to show how key phenomenological concepts inform Keynesian economics. There is no indication that Keynes “knew” phenomenology but it well describes what he was doing when he brought “psychological” factors to bear on economic problems. With his “phenomenological turn,” Keynes freed economics from neo-classical models and could then revise theory to explain the Great Depression and prescribe a way out of it. Arguably, such a “turn” today could expose the gap between Wall Street practice and Main Street realities as it points to a need to ground financial abstractions in lived economic experience.