A discussion of the need to complement phenomenology’s emphasis on description and first-person experience, in accounting for the human production of meaning, with hermeneutics’ emphasis on interpretation and third-person experience, partially through accounting for the roles of corrigibility and argumentation in the phenomenological method.

On September 10th 1951, in the context of the Rencontres internationales of Geneva, Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave his lecture L’homme et l’adversité (“Man and Adversity”). In an accurate diagnosis of European culture, his analysis sprang from the phenomenological premises defined by Edmund Husserl in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie that the post-World War II context modified in its epistemological, moral and political conceptions. !e urgency for an answer to the new situation of mankind’s condition will entail a transfor mation of human knowledge as well as of the sensitive areas of our experience. Consequently, a new experience of our condition will call into question the concept of “humanism” itself, demanding a profound revision of the regression of the dynamisms of experience that have ended up in a loss—or failure—of Western culture’s conceptions. This essay will try to reactivate and upgrade the serene testimony of a thought whose premises lie in the inconclusive origin of a radical crisis: the experience of contingency and adversity.

In this article, I deal with the problem of social order from a phenomenological standpoint. In the first place, I summarize Schutz’s position on constitutional analysis and its relevance for the Social Sciences. In the second place, I pose some questions related to the constitution of social realities in Husserl, which have also been acknowledged by Schutz. In the third place, I discuss the significance of the constitutional analysis of the thing in Husserl for a phenomenological approach to social facts in Durkheim’s sense. Finally, I sketch out some features of social order understood as a constituted region.

This paper was mostly motivated by Peru’s intense social and economic problems that exploded in an internal armed conflict of exceeding violence, from 1980 to 2000. The A. uses the experience within her country as an exemplification of more global cultural and ideological antagonisms among countries, regions or hemispheres, and to ask whether an encounter beyond cultural differences and reconciliation beyond ideologically motivated antagonisms is at all possible, and upon which bases. Husserl left descriptions that indicate how “plurality” and difference dwell within the most intimate core of one’s “oneness” and “identity”, offering clues as to how we are able to conceive and build “common worlds”, “common truths” and even “objective truth”. The A. finally confronts these transcendental-phenome nological accounts with some elements of certain Amazonian ethnic groups’ worldview, which may seem totally “incompossible” with the Western view that finally nourishes some of Husserl’s basic notions.

This work aims at articulating Heidegger and Winnicott’s proposal regarding the issue of the concrete patterns of identity. First, we shall make a brief exposure of the multiplicity of subjective roles in each of the authors. Second, we shall propose a narrativist interpretation of the issue of the self in both of the aforementioned authors. This work shall not only limit to state the mainly narrative structure of Heidegger’s Selbst and of Winnicott’s Self, but it shall also aim at determining a concrete narrative pattern for each of these roles.

This article develops a phenomenological contribution to the notion of biology in psychopathology and psychiatry. Grounded in the principles of transformation, heterogeneity, proportionality and particularity, a paradigm of phenomenological orientation allocates to biology a role different from that assumed by mainstream psychiatry. First, no clear definition of what is biological may be established a priori as of general application. Second, the research agenda in biological psychiatry necessarily intersects with investigation of the particularities of each individual clinical case. Finally, the continuity of the biological agenda needs to resume the construction and investigation of psychopathological categories that cohere with the reality of the mental universe.

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl demonstrates the need to distinguish between the meaning of a linguistic expression and its relationship to an extralinguistic object in reality. Husserl distinguishes two kinds of signs: the “indicative sign” (Anzeichen) and the “expressive sign”, which he also calls “expression” (Ausdruck). He draws the distinction with the claim that an indicative sign “indicates” something but does not express a “meaning” (Bedeutung). In other words, he disentangles the expression, as the sign which expresses a meaning, from its usual entanglement with the indicative sign. In the First Investigation of the Logical Investigations, Husserl dwells on intersubjective discourse only long enough to isolate the expressive sign and attempts to capture the way contents and acts become thematic in communication by contrasting the expressive and the indicative function of the signs. In order to study the logical meaning of a sign, Husserl excludes as irrelevant the indicative sign and devotes his analysis to the logical expressions. The article first clarifies the basic concepts of Husserl’s theory of meaning. To appreciate his observations, we might recall how the process of communication comes up in Husserl (I). Furthermore, an attempt is made in this paper to show that meaning is not restricted to linguistic expressions (II). Since communication is contaminated by indications, it can no longer be totally expressive. As a consequence, it is only when communication is suspended that pure expressivity is regained. In order to restore pure expression, the relation with the other has to be suspended. This means that the process of expression does not owe anything to the empirical world, including the empirically spoken world. It also means that the solitary subject does not need indications in order to have a relation with itself. The reason is the immediate presence of conscious life to itself. According to this, there arises the problem of whether the corporal movements are expressions, too. In response to this difficulty, I will take up Husserl’s considerations of the constitution of intersubjectivity through corporal movements. The main purpose of this article consists in showing a possible way to answer this question. The conclusion summarizes the main points and recalls that there is also another kind of expressions that Husserl did not consider in the Logical Investigations.

This paper aims to present some aspects of the noematical connections between kinaesthesis and the own Body that can be drawn following Husserl’s static and genetic analyses. These aspects concern: 1) the introduction of the concept of kinaesthesis as the phenomenological residuum of the “muscle sensations”, and in reference to the own Body as the bearer of all sensations; 2) the noematic constitution of the own Body both as a physical thing and as the “organ” of the I, the latter being constituted in turn in a sensing and a moving stratum; 3) the reference of the “I move” as a mode of the “I can (move)” to the I as subject of a system of practical capacities; 4) this system’s genetic structure in the living present as an habitual one whose noematic correlate can be described as a “schema” of possible orientations and typical presentations of things within the world; 5) the difference between kinaesthetical systems in plural and Kinaesthesis in singular as all-compassing unity.

This article focuses on the cybernetic reality, asking about its ontological and epistemological aspects and about its possible educational horizons. We develop the ontological arguments about the cybernetic reality drawing from authors that deal with Virtual Reality (VR) such as Levy and Castells. They take VR as a concept and show us which of the concept’s characteristics are in opposition to those characteristics that do not belong to VR. These procedures present difficulties that are confronted when one tries to express the concept of cybernetic world reality. They concern space and time, and what is deemed real, virtual, probable, potential and actual. These difficulties are confronted, attempting to clarify the philosophical meanings of reality by drawing on presenting studies by Granger and Deleuze, and assuming the phenomenological conceptions of knowledge and world. The authors assume that cyberspace is a world reality, which reveals its own characteristics as being dynamic, fast, speeded, de-territorialized. !e cyberspace reality is supported by a strong scientific and technological apparatus and updates its potentialities through the possible intervention triggered by the actions of people living-in-the-world-with-others-and-with-the-media. The modalities of these interventions are actualized with the exchange among subjects during knowledge production and social communication. The apparatus of the cybernetic world makes possible the collaborative knowledge construction and distance education (e-learning). The authors present and discuss the educational horizons as well as the open region of possibilities that are posed at the world, which can be realized and can be worked in a cybernetic context.

Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Husserl’s reference to the lived body as a “remarkably incompletely constituted thing” transforms the sense of the phrase. My aim is to recover Husserl’s original sense by turning not only to his writings, but to the relevant experiential evidence. I show that any attempt to account for the constitution of the body as a thing necessarily presupposes a body that is constituting rather than constituted, then suggest how “constitution” can be understood methodologically rather than metaphysically, concluding with some reflections on how descriptions produced through Husserlian phenomenological practice both sustain and outrun specific positions in phenomenological philosophy.

The paper evaluates two theses central to Max Scheler’s philosophy of religion: that essential knowledge of God is universal to humankind, and that this knowledge is irreducible to any experience outside itself. We examine the phenomenology of the fivefold process whereby we obtain knowledge of the Absolute. The conclusion is that the first thesis is plausible, and the second less so. However, the defense of the second thesis led Scheler to a fruitful phenomenology of religious experience as seeing the world in the light of God. The paper evaluates this world-view as an alternative to the scientific Weltanschauung.

There are few phenomena more tragic than rape-resultant pregnancy; faced with such pregnancies, rape victims are forced to make incredibly difficult and often heart-rending decisions. Yet both public and academic discourse on rape-pregnancy fails to acknowledge the profoundly tragic nature of these decisions, and also tends to implicitly or explicitly blame victims who opt for abortion or adoption. This paper critiques the use of praise and blame in relation to rape-resultant pregnancies, emphasizing the harmful effects of moral judgments on pregnant rape victims, and calls instead for a new ethical paradigm that acknowledges the deeply tragic nature of this phenomenon.

In this paper, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of anonymity in the Phenomenology of Perception bears a strong resemblance to Luce Irigaray’s discussions of the elemental. I argue that reading these two accounts together helps to counter some of the critiques waged by feminists against the language of anonymity, because anonymity—like the elemental—does not in fact function as a positive substratum that would shore up sameness and prevent the rupture of difference. Instead, anonymity names the way in which the subject is always already disrupted by its encounter with and belonging-to the natural world.

Max Scheler’s late work takes a peculiar turn toward a more speculative approach to phenomenology, particularly the work carried out under the titles of philosophical anthropology and metaphysics. I argue in this paper that this shift in Scheler’s approach does not render this late work as abstract, but rather deepens his investigations into the meaning the most fundamental and concrete human act, the act of love. Scheler’s late work ultimately demonstrates that loving is the task of being human.

Sartre’s Being and Nothingness intends to establish a “phenomenology of action,” where being-for-itself is structured by the law of consciousness and intentionality. Choice organizes the situation while being determined by the limitation of facticity. Anguish and nausea are twin structures that concern the breakdown of the for-itself’s relation to its freedom and to objects as meaningful, respectively. Sartre’s The Imaginary clarifies the central conceit of the novel Nausea. Finally, the discussion of anguish and nausea provide central insights into Sartre’s theory of subjectivity and phenomenology of action.

This small essay is part of a book project called “Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy: Towards the Outside” (under contract with Indiana University Press). Examining key texts in Bergson, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault, the book lays out a kind of narrative. The narrative aims to show that these thinkers contain conceptual components from which emerges a research program. There are four components: the overcoming of metaphysics (understood as Platonism); the starting point in immanent, subjective experience; the transformation of immanence into multiplicity; and a new form of thinking adequate to multiplicity. The crucial component is the transformation of immanence into multiplicity. Multiplicity is the outside.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Vicar in Emile provides a phenomenological model for the co-constitution of self and world out of experiences as they emerge in the first person perspective. Self and world or non-self are intertwined in experience. Self is a spontaneous activity that differentiates and selects items given in experience as belonging to it based on how those items are given: by feelings or sentiments originating in the self or by sensations originating in the external world. Making this differentiation is not easy due to the interpenetration of self and world. Self constitutes itself according to ontological categories of mind and body that sort the sentiments. Self is constituted as a union of mental and bodily sentiments. Self constitutes the world according to how sentiments orient it toward the world and how sensations give the world to the self.

In Levinas’ Otherwise than Being, the mother appears as the prototype of ethical subjectivity, complete being for the other. Adams argues that Levinas appropriates the maternal perspective without concern for the actual complexities of motherhood. He especially neglects the (very common) experience of maternal ambivalence and women’s desires for independence. Ironically, Adams claims, Levinas provides the most valuable insights to mothering as an ethical practice when he is not speaking of mothers, women, or the “feminine” directly. In particular, he illuminates the temporality of maternal ethics and its complex relationship to freedom.

This paper explores some implications of Ricoeur’s conception of testimony. Testimony plays two roles: it enables us to know what actually happened and it reveals how the past continues to be meaningful. However, these two roles generate a peculiar problem: the meaning of the past, as bearing witness, cannot be exhausted by a narrative account of what happened. Furthermore, since testimony situates a people within a tradition and raises suspicion on such a narrative by showing that it does not fully bear witness to the past, Ricoeur’s understanding of testimony opens a site for ethical and political challenges.

Heidegger’s turn to Being-in-the-World accentuates how human beings have access to the world. Heidegger’s destructive retrieval makes possible the unveiling of hidden Being and the recovery of community that Husserl’s solispsism overlooks. Through Ereignis, Vorsicht, and the falling silent of language on the way to Being, Heidegger’s later thought can achieve the synthesis of multiplicity and unity that Hegel and Derrida were unable to find.