Phenomenology

A ‘nonplace’, in Marc Augé’s view, may be defined in contrast to what he refers to as anthropological place’. It is spaced that cannot be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity. This article explores the sense of (non)place by answering these questions: if it is true that ‘who’ we are is defined by ‘where’ we are, insinuating that places do have an important role in shaping our identities, then what do these nonplaces tell us about us? In places that lack any defining features and reflect little of the unique local geography in which they are in, can we still develop a sense of place? What is needed now is a shift from the initial prioritizing of ‘cultural contexts’, to the ‘context of the ‘embodied’, emplaced, individual subject, a context that precedes any cognitive framework. Bearing in mind this shift in focus to the body, a phenomenological analysis of nonplaces then becomes necessary. The experiential value of a place must be assessed according to a lived, embodied engagement with it. Rem Koolhas’ view of a ‘generic city’ in which urban dwellers now live has worldwide reverberations. This paper argues that a phenomenological analysis that emphasizes on subjective, embodied, lived experience is a necessary step to make. By focusing on the body, the strict categorisations that have led to negative connotations to nonplaces begin to lose their rigidity.

Keywords: Nonplace, space, identity, urban environment, a sense of place, embodiment, generic city

Foucault Studies, No. 14, Sept. 2012, p. 98-114
http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/3894/4239

«Considérations sur le marxisme, la phénoménologie et le pouvoir»
Cités, No. 52, Déc. 2012, p. 103-126
http://www.puf.com/Revues:Cit%C3%A9s_2012_-_N%C2%B0_52
http://www.cairn.info/revue-cites-2012--p-101.htm

This is an interview with Michel Foucault by Colin Gordon and Paul Patton conducted at Foucault's Paris apartment in April 1978 and published in the original French and in English translation in 2012. There is an introductory note by Alain Beaulieu who arranged the authorised publication, and a note on the background to the interview by Colin Gordon.

Both Millikan's brand of naturalistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology have held on to teleological notions, despite their being out of favor in mainstream Western philosophy for most of the twentieth century. Both traditions have recognized the need for teleology in order to adequately account for intentionality, the need to adequately account for intentionality in order to adequately account for meaning, and the need for an adequate theory of meaning in order to precisely and consistently describe the world and life. The stark differences between their accounts of these fundamental concepts stem from radically different conceptions of the world, the natural and life. I argue that Millikan's teleosemantic approach relies on a teleology of determination by means of the lawfulness of nature that leaves no room for the freedom of self-determination, for reason, or for experience-for the reality of lived human life. In contrast to Millikan's account, Husserl's transcendental phenomenology situates teleology as a function of reason and first-personal experience, part of an extended account of intentionality and meaning according to which the full range of our making sense of the world is conceived as a rational activity that is itself a part of that world, and not an unnatural activity to be separated from it. While Husserl's account of these issues is indeed symptomatic of what Millikan calls "meaning rationalism," I argue that it is immune to the sorts of problems she claims will plague any such account, since these problems arise only against the background of a set of presuppositions about intentionality (representationalism, the "mythiness" of all givens) that Husserl does not share. Husserl's position can itself be understood to be within the bounds of a suitably liberal conception of naturalism, and interpreting him in this way it has the added benefit--contra Millikan--of not divorcing teleology from reason, the latter construed as our first-personal striving to make sense of the world as we experience it--of life.

This article presents a brief report of a first-person investigation through drawing, discussing how serially developed drawing can be understood to express the becoming of 'now' – the present moment in time. By employing a phenomenological approach, the notion that drawing expresses this idea is treated as an assumption, meaning a hypothesis to be tested through practice and theory combined. This occurs as part of my developing research practice, where I look to ‘perform philosophy in a non-philosophical way’ (Emoe 2014). Rather than treat art as an object for philosophy, I use philosophy to question a thought that I, as a practitioner, believe is immanent to drawing as form of art – that drawing itself is a form of becoming, based on the intentionality underpinning the temporal experience of drawing.

This book shows how a masterpiece of experimental cinema can be interpreted through hermeneutics of the film world. As an application of Ricœurian methodology to a non-narrative film, the book calls into question the fundamental concept of the film world. Firmly rooted within the context of experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man was not created on the basis of a narrative structure and representation of characters, places and events, but on very different presuppositions. The techniques with which Brakhage worked on celluloid and used frames as canvases, as well as his choice to make the film without dialogue and sound, exhort the interpreter to directly question the philosophical language of moving images.
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030124250

I try to study in this paper the virtual reality called SecondLife making use of the phenomenological method. For this purpose I analyze what happens in the natural attitude where reality is the factual existence here-and-now, and against which the virtual reality bears a duplication of planes: the real-real thing and my digital copy. To analyze what sustains the concept of reality it is necessary to make use of the epokhe. By means of it, we find out the relation of a bodily subject to the world, in a sense that is not given in SecondLife, a virtual universe whose zero-point is just my avatar, that is, the physical object that represents me. The paper unfolds of the consequences of this contrast. RESUMEN: En este artículo pretendemos estudiar el fenómeno de la realidad virtual SecondLife usando el método fenomenológico. Para ello partimos del análisis de lo que sucede en la actitud natural. En ésta, la realidad es el aquí-ahora fácticamente existente que se me da, y la realidad virtual conlleva una duplicación de planos: lo real-real y mi copia digital. Para desentrañar el entramado que sustenta el concepto de realidad es necesario aplicar la epojé. Mediante ésta, damos con la imbricación de un cuerpo viviente y el mundo, relación que no se da en SecondLife, universo virtual cuyo punto cero es mi avatar u objeto físico que me representa. El artículo es el despliegue de las consecuencias de las ideas aquí expuestas.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among combat veterans remains an urgent and intractable problem for those who have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this paper, we argue that one of the reasons that combat related PTSD remains so difficult to treat is because psychologists and American culture at large do not fully understand it yet. It is our contention that there are two contributing factors that currently hinder our ability to successfully treat combat related PTSD. The first is a failure to look critically at the theoretical underpinnings that ground our current understanding of the disorder. The second related issue is our tendency to look to reductionist explanations and treatments. We use the theoretical framework of phenomenology alongside a case study of a man we call James in order to present this argument.

One of the most persistent and poignant human experiences is the sensation of longing—a restlessness perhaps best described as the unspoken conviction that something is missing from our lives. In this study, Drew M. Dalton attempts to illuminate this experience by examining the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas on longing, or what Levinas terms “metaphysical desire.”

Metaphysical desire, according to Levinas, does not stem from any determinate lack within us, nor does it aim at a particular object beyond us, much less promise any eventual satisfaction. Rather, it functions in the realm of the infinite where such distinctions as inside and outside or one and the other are indistinguishable, perhaps even eliminated. As Levinas conceives such longing, it becomes a mediator in our relation to the other—both the human other and the divine Other.

Dalton follows the meandering trail of Levinas’s thought along a series of dialogues with some of the philosophers within the history of the Western tradition who have most influenced his corpus. By tracing the genealogy of Levinas’s notion of metaphysical desire—namely in the works of Plato, Heidegger, Fichte, Schelling, and Otto—the nature of this Levinasian theme is elucidated to reveal that it is not simply an idealism, a “hagiography of desire” detached from actual experience and resulting in a disconnect between his phenomenological account and our own lives. Rather, Levinas’s account of metaphysical desire points to a phenomenology of human longing that is both an ethical and religious phenomenon. In the end, human longing is revealed to be one of the most profound ways in which a subject becomes a subject, arising to its “true self,” and hearing the call to responsibility placed upon it by the Other.

Throughout, Dalton explicates the nuance of a number of key Levinasian terms, many of which have been taken from the Western philosophical tradition and reinscribed with a new meaning. Eros, the “Good beyond being,” shame, responsibility, creation, the trace, the il y a, and the holy are discovered to be deeply tied to Levinas’s account of metaphysical desire, resulting in a conclusion regarding longing’s role in the relationship between the finite and the Infinite.

This paper provides an initial, multidimensional map of the complex relationships among consciousness, mind, brain and the external world in a way that follows both the contours of everyday experience and the findings of science. It then demonstrates how this reflexive monist map can be used to evaluate the utility and resolve some of the oppositions of the many other “isms” that currently populate consciousness studies. While no conventional, one-dimensional “ism” such as physicalism can do justice to this web of relationships, physicalism, functionalism, dualism, neutral monism, and dual-aspect monism can all be seen to provide useful ways of understanding different aspects of the relationships among consciousness, mind, brain and the external world when these are viewed in either a first- or a third-person way from within this web of relationships by sentient creatures such as ourselves. For example, physicalism and functionalism provide a useful understanding of consciousness, mind, brain and external world when viewed from a third-person perspective, while neutral monism provides a useful way of understanding first- versus third-person views of external phenomena. On the other hand, dual-aspect monism provides a useful way of understanding first- versus third-person views of mind, including Eastern versus Western views of mind.  Dual-aspect monism also provides a useful understanding of the “unconscious ground of being” that gives rise to, supports and embeds all these observable phenomena. For an integrated understanding one needs to understand how these phenomena and relationships combine into an integrated whole.

Dans le cadre de leur interprétation phénoménologique de la pensée de Wittgenstein, Jaakko et Merrill B. Hintikka ont proposé un argument concernant la nature des objets de l’ontologie du Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Selon eux, les objets du Tractatus sont identifiables aux objets de l’épistémologie russellienne, à savoir les sense-data. Cette identification des objets tractariens aux sense-data les conduit à avancer que le symbolisme développé par Wittgenstein dans le Tractatus est un langage phénoménologique, celui dont le philosophe parle dans ses Remarques philosophiques de 1929. Dans le présent mémoire, je montre qu’il existe de bonnes raisons de douter de la vérité de la thèse des Hintikka et défends que l’interprétation non empiriste du Tractatus proposée par David Pears est plus convaincante que leur lecture phénoménologique de la philosophie du premier Wittgenstein.

How can we describe movements in animated films? In Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics, Ryan Pierson introduces a powerful new method for the study of animation. By looking for figures--arrangements that seem to intuitively hold together--and forces--underlying units of attraction, repulsion, and direction--Pierson reveals startling new possibilities for animation criticism, history, and theory. Drawing on concepts from Gestalt psychology, Pierson offers a wide-ranging comparative study of four animation techniques--soft-edged forms, walk cycles, camera movement, and rotoscoping--as they appear in commercial, artisanal, and avant-garde works. In the process, through close readings of little-analyzed films, Pierson demonstrates that figures and forces make fertile resources for theoretical speculation, unearthing affinities between animation practice and such topics as the philosophy of mathematics, scientific and political revolution, and love. Beginning and ending with the imperative to look closely, Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics is a performance in seeing the world of motion anew.

È veramente possibile comprendersi? Siamo in grado di coesistere con gli inviolabili spazi che ci separano? La psicologia cognitiva ha elaborato alcuni modelli che tentano di spiegare la comprensione dell’altro. Ma cosa accade se questo altro è un personaggio letterario? Come possiamo provare delle emozioni per dei personaggi che non esistono nella realtà? Per sceverare questi temi mi sono basata su alcune derivazioni della tradizione fenomenologica, analitica e su alcuni studi di psicologia cognitiva, partendo dall’assunto che elementi tratti dalle diverse tradizioni possano servire vicendevolmente da correttivi.

Responding to critiques of Dilthey's interpretive psychology, I revisit its relation with epistemology and the human sciences. Rather than reducing knowledge to psychology and psychology to subjective understanding , Dilthey articulated the epistemic worth of a psychology involving (1) an impure phenomenology of embodied, historically-situated, and worldly consciousness as individually lived yet complicit with its naturally and socially constituted contexts, (2) experience-and communication-oriented processes of interpreting others, (3) the use of third-person structural functional analysis and causal explanation, and (4) a recognition of the ungroundability, facticity, and conflict inherent in knowledge and life.

In this paper I discuss in a critical manner what I believe to be some of the more interesting contributions of Anthony Steinbock’s book Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. I will thus refer mainly to his clarification of the constitution of familiar and alien objects or states of affairs through appropriation and transgression. In connection with this I will try to put forward some of the advantages and implications of a phenomenological approach to the problem of historicity in terms of generativity.  However, I will also discuss some of the limitations and problems of Steinbock’s approach. I believe that most if not all of these problems are related to his understanding of the relationship between static, genetic and generative phenomenological methods. Therefore I will devote some lines to discuss this issue and to rethink some of Steinbock’s main theses under the light of another way of understanding the relationship between these methods as well as the task of the philosophical inquiry proposed by phenomenology.

The theme of spectatorship is central in this essay that reviews and critiques a number of approaches to animation spectatorship. Its basic premise is that the phenomenal and the noumenal 'worlds' animation confronts us have an uneasy relationship with notions of 'reality' and representation.

Using a framework of phenomenological concepts that reviews other authors' approaches to animation spectatorship, the essay explores the viewer's experience of the 'worlds' of animation film in screening, particularly investigating the relationship between the images on screen and their tangible, extant counterparts in the real world outside the diegesis. With a focus on puppet animation exemplified by the Quay Brothers Street of Crocodiles, the essay posits a number of propositions as to how animation as a form addresses and engages its audience. If aims to articulate the difference between a world, created with the animation technique, and the world, the phenomenal world we negotiate in our daily lives.

The book is available at:
http://www.johnlibbey.com/books_detail.php?area=ani&ID=50

Drawing upon John Burnet’s interpretation of mesotēs, I explore the original meanings of this important Greek word and its inherent relations to the concepts of formal cause, final cause, and actuality [energeia]. My investigation reveals the concept of mesotēs as an Ariadne’s thread running through the whole system of Aristotle’s moral and natural philosophy. It also throws a new light on the implications of Aristotle’s definition of moral virtue and the essential role it plays in the truth of human existence.

El problema acerca de la existencia de la mente y de su relación con el mundo físico no es ninguna novedad: ya se discutía sobre la dicotomía de la percepción individual frente a la inmanencia del mundo físico en la Antigua Grecia, y fue Descartes quien volvió a retomar el debate sobre el cuerpo y la mente, contando en su caso con nuevos enfoques y métodos de razonamiento propios de la Modernidad. A partir de la teoría cartesiana de la mente, se han desarrollado diversas teorías que han tratado de explicar o de negar la relación entre la conciencia y la conducta humana, pero todas ellas tienen algo en común: la relevancia del papel del lenguaje a la hora de intentar comprender por qué existe un yo, cómo se construye y qué relación tiene con el mundo que nos rodea… Si es que éste existe, claro. Este trabajo se propone realizar un repaso por estas teorías reivindicando la importancia del lenguaje en el estudio de la mente humana y tratando de concluir con una reflexión personal sobre la naturaleza de la conciencia.

The existence of the mind and its relation with the physical world is not a novelty problem: it was discussed about the individual perception's dichotomyin face of the inherence of physical world in the Ancient Greece, and, what is more, Descartes was the person who picked up the thread of body and mind, taking into account the new perspective and Modernity reasoning methods. From the Cartesian theory of the mind, it has been developed several theories that try to explain or to deny the relation between the consciousness and the human behavior, but all of them have something in common: the language importance at the time of trying to understand why exist a " me " , how it is constructed and what relation has with the world around us… if it exists, of course. The purpose of this paper is to review the different theories claiming the importance of the language in the studies of the human mind, and to conclude with a personal reflection about the nature of the conciusness.

A overview of the "Self-Consciousness" chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.  I analyze the basic significance of each of the three themes of the chapter, (which Hegel calls "desire," "recognition," and "thought"), and I consider how the relationship between self and other is constituted in each of these fundamental relationships.

Addendum: Footnote 24 on page 590 should be to pages 88-89 of the following:

Martin Heidegger. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking. Translated by Andrew Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.

A reading of modern poetry can be fetched here, focusing upon the Heideggerian Phenomenology: Paul Celan's works, which serves here as an object of observation for the researcher, streams our thought and insight through the combined works of Martin Heidegger that reflect a modern philosophically emphasising method of understanding, revealing the mysterious veil of writing.

Tiger C. Roholt explains why grooves, which are forged in music's rhythmic nuances, remain hidden to some listeners. He argues that grooves are not graspable through the intellect nor through mere listening; rather, grooves are disclosed through our bodily engagement with music. We grasp a groove bodily by moving with music's pulsations. By invoking the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of "motor intentionality," Roholt shows that the "feel" of a groove, and the understanding of it, are two sides of a coin: to "get" a groove just is to comprehend it bodily and to feel that embodied comprehension.

One way to examine the enigmatic meaningfulness of human life is to ask under which conditions persons ask in earnest for assistance to die, either through euthanasia or physician assisted suicide. The counterpart of intolerable suffering must consist in some form of, however minimal, flourishing that makes people want to go on with their lives, disregarding other reasons to reject assisted dying that have more to do with religious prohibitions. To learn more about why persons want to hasten death during the last days, weeks or months of their lives, what kinds of suffering they fear and what they hold to be the main reasons to carry on or not carry on living, the paper offers some examples from a book written by the physician Uwe-Christian Arnold. He has helped hundreds of persons in Germany to die with the aid of sedative drugs the last 25 years, despite the professional societies and codes in Germany that prohibit such actions. The paper discusses various examples from Arnold’s book and makes use of them to better understand not only why people sometimes want to die but what made their lives meaningful before they reached this final decision.

The capability of traditional Scholastic ethics to guide contemporary man in all his complexities has been called into question when Secular Humanism and, subsequently, Postmodernism have redirected attention from human acts to the agent person himself. While Secular Humanism has led to the advancement of science,and Postmodernism has instilled a resilient attitude in dealing with the issues of Modernism, the conceptual independence required in these philosophies and their corollary intellectual scientism has, at the same time, downgraded reliance on holistic and integrative knowledge, leading to a denial of the roles of faith, tradition, and authority in man's conceptual development. Karol Wojtyla's Personalism and Phenomenology emphasizes the primacy of the person without degrading the values inherent in action. Wojtyla's philosophy has bridged the ideals of traditional moral teachings with present-day pluralistic experiences when he situated freedom in the ego and when he grounded habit into the inner experience of man, rather than in character. With such freedom and self-determination, vertical transcendence becomes both experiential and personal. In this paper, I venture into how Wojtyla's thought has enhanced Thomistic philosophy by presenting an exposition of the various elements of The Acting Person vis-à-vis the discussions of the Angelic Doctor on parallel issues.

Wir leben in Klangwelten, die unser Erleben einer lebendigen Wirklichkeit prägen. Wir suchen nach außeralltäglichen Klangerlebnissen in aufwändig inszenierten Spiel-Räumen. Diese Spiel-Räume sind Räume der erlebten Interaktion, es sind fremde Räume, in denen wir zu uns selbst finden wollen und die als Heterotopien Zerstreuung vom Gewöhnlichen versprechen. Die in diesem Buch vorgenommene phänomenologische Untersuchung beschreibt die Ästhetisierung des Lebens anhand der Klangräume der Erlebnisgesellschaft. Es ist eine Aufforderung zum kritischen Hinhören und ein Plädoyer für die Planungsrelevanz klanggeographischer Lebenswirklichkeiten.

The book is a phenomenological study of the sonorous dimension of ludic spaces. Drawing mainly on introspection, the study approaches various heterotopias like theme parks, stadia, protest marches, rock concerts and religious places through listening. The author explores a broad range of phenomenological literature on sound and space, including conceptual works on atmospheres.

In this afterword to an important collection of essays that address the clinical aspects of the new phenomenology's concept of "atmospheres" in terms of psychopathology, I consider whether gestalt therapy may be an hospitable modality for these concerns.  I approach gestalt therapy as a clinical phenomenology and, as such, see many possible ways for the new phenomenology and gestalt therapy to critically engage one another. 

Please cite: Dan Bloom, D. (2019). Neither from the “Inside” Looking “Out” nor from the “Outside” Looking “In.” In G. Francesetti & T. Griffero (Eds.), Psychopathology and Atmospheres, neither inside nor outside (pp. 178–190). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

To compare Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s phenomenal bodies, I first examine how for Merleau-Ponty phenomena appear on the basis of three levels of integration: 1) between the parts of the world, 2) between the parts of the body, and 3) between the body and its world. I contest that Deleuze’s attacks on phenomenology can be seen as constructive critiques rather than as being expressions of an anti-phenomenological position. By building from Deleuze’s definition of the phenomenon and from his more phenomenologically relevant writings, we find that phenomena for him are given to the body under exactly the opposite conditions as for Merleau-Ponty, namely that 1) the world’s differences 2) appear to a disordered body that 3) comes into shocking affective contact with its surroundings. I argue that a Deleuzian theory of bodily-given phenomena is better suited than Merleau-Ponty’s model in the task of accounting for the intensity of phenomenal appearings.

This paper explains why it is necessary to employ two apparently disparate qualitative methodologies to address multidimensional research objectives of a complex phenomenon: non-native English-speaking teachers' (NNESTs) professional identity. This paper proposes a combined methodology of narrative enquiry and hermeneutic phenomenological enquiry to construct understanding in terms of what NNESTs describe as their experiences of professional identity development and the researcher's interpretations of their thickly layered data. This proposed methodology is the adopted version of the Methodology chapter of a confirmed Australian doctoral project. The purpose of this paper is to show how, by employing the two methodologies, the author intends to capture individual teachers' meaning makings and their common phenomena of professional identity formation. With justification, the paper includes components of a qualitative research design: research paradigm, methodological approach, and the methods.