Ageing brings together biological, personal, and social horizons. Attempts to reduce it or to privilege one of these dimensions over the others fail to fully capture the phenomenon. The temporality of ageing presents an irreducible complexity. It is the inextricable intertwinement of three temporalities, three rhythms on different scales: biological time, personal-narrative time, and historical time. In all these dimensions something is of crucial concern: time and temporality. Yet, many philosophers who have thought about time (even those who take seriously (...) the lived experience of temporality) have paid little attention to ageing. Drawing from Heidegger, Scheler, and Schutz, this paper argues that ageing is an irreducible complex of different temporalities where one encounters the historicity of the world through a process of losing touch with it. (shrink)

Between what we call “us” and what we call “them”, a line must be drawn, which immediately becomes a contentious border, or a divide, that brings to the fore who “we” are, and that consigns to the background, or to the margin, those people who do not count as “us”. Wherever this border is traced — whether along the lines of existing nation-states, racial or linguistic communities, or political affiliations — the resulting potential for antagonism leads to both internal social (...) tensions within a society and, at the level of nations, to outright war—the ultimate example of the friend/enemy divide conceptualized by Carl Schmitt. Once this is recognized, the problem we encounter is the following: can we think of nothing else along the boundaries between “us” and “them”, but an antithesis, nothing else but an antagonism? Under what conditions, “from within what axiomatic” (Derrida), can political thinkers be assured, that the “us/them” relation is by necessity one of hostility? In this paper I will set up a dialogue between Bernhard Waldenfels and Jacques Derrida around the figure of the stranger [_étranger_] — a figure which “frequently operates as a limit-experience for humans trying to identify themselves over and against others” (Kearney) — in order to challenge the logic of this presupposition. My aim is to show how the encounter between these thinkers allows us to challenge _at the same time_ the antagonistic view of the “us/them” relation and the logic of binary opposition that informs it. (shrink)

The question of how other consciousnesses appear via media has forced us to re-think the classical phenomenological accounts of sociality. However, as the phenomenological account of empathy is very much centred around the perception of the other’s living body, it has faced challenges in discussing the empathic experience in media-based contexts, where we cannot perceive the other’s body, but something else, such as a screen or a text. In this article, I provide the concept for describing the perceived object in (...) media-based empathy: a living textual body, based on Edith Stein’s concept of Wortleib (a living word body) referring to words as “living,” as bearers of meaning in her early work On the Problem of Empathy [Zum Problem der Einfühlung]. I divide the term Wortleib in two different cases—the empathic and non-empathic object—and thereby argue that, while the object of media-based empathic experience cannot be the other’s body, it is an empathic Wortleib, a communicative empathic object. While Stein herself discussed media-based empathy merely in paper media, I demonstrate the unique usefulness of these concepts in analysing any media-based communication and thus the timeliness of her work in this respect. (shrink)

Current research on second-person relations has often overlooked that this is not a new topic. Addressed mostly under the heading of the “I–thou relation,” second-person relations were discussed by central figures of the phenomenological tradition, including Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, but also quite extensively by much lesser-known authors, such as Karl Löwith, Ludwig Binswanger, and Semyon L. Frank, whose work has been undeservedly neglected in current research. This paper starts off by arguing that, in spite of the rightly acknowledged (...) differences between the Husserlian and the Heideggerian approaches to the investigation of the social world, both approaches converge in the claim that the I–thou relation is founded on more basic forms of sociality. In a second step, against the background of Frank’s and Binswanger’s challenges to that claim, I argue that Löwith’s proposal that the I–thou relation is a primordial form of sociality can be vindicated by conceptualizing I–thou relations as close personal relationships (paradigmatically exemplified by companion friendships and romantic partnerships). After assessing how Löwith’s approach to the I–thou relation stands vis-à-vis Heidegger’s and Husserl’s views, I conclude by suggesting how Löwith’s approach can contribute to current research on second-person relations. (shrink)

The status of continuity in Deleuze’s metaphysics is a subject of debate. Deleuze calls the virtual, in Difference and Repetition, an Ideal continuum, and the differential relations that constitute the Ideal imply the continuity of this field. But, Deleuze does not hesitate to formulate the same field by the affirmation of divergence (incompossibility) that can be regarded as a form of discontinuity. It is, hence, unclear how these two ostensibly contradictory accounts might reconcile. This article attempts to reconstitute a Deleuzian (...) theory of continuity through Leibniz, whose philosophy is equally subject to a tension between the law of continuity, prevalent in his mathematics and metaphysics, and the discontinuity or absolute individuality of monads. By reorienting The Fold around the motif of continuity a new conceptual space is opened for continuity qua heterogeneity-and-inseparability. Then, enfolding the conceptual personae of The Fold onto Difference and Repetition reveals the tacit though decisive presence of different types of continuity operational in Deleuze’s metaphysics that will be called divergent, intensive, torsional, and tenorsional continuities. (shrink)

The critique of pure sense data is a characteristic feature of contemporary philosophy, from Wittgenstein and Heidegger to Martha Nussbaum and Ernst Tugendhat. These authors variously call into question that the data of sensation should be taken as primordial. Other contemporary authors have responded to this general critique starting from considerations about the role of sensory states, often referred to as “qualia,” in our experiential awareness. In this paper, I suggest that the philosophy of science of Ernst Mach is especially (...) paradigmatic in that it displays in one same intellectual effort the presence of these two polarizing views in the philosophical discussion of the twentieth century. In Mach a radical biological and epistemic pragmatism coexists with the most extreme sensual elementism. I show that Mach is at the same time the proponent of a phenomenological lineage that Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, is aware to take up and continue. What I propose is that Husserl’s phenomenology emerges as true juncture between the extremes of sensualism and pragmatism by way of a recasting of the modern intentionalist conceptions of experience beyond any mentalist and realist paradigm. (shrink)

In Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, John Rogove and Pietro D’Oriano have compiled nineteen essays discussing or displaying Heidegger’s influence on anglophone philosophy. The collection includes papers taking a pragmatist approach to the interpretation of Heidegger, as well as papers taking a continentalist approach. In this way, the editors hope to begin to overcome the mutual isolation in which these two prevailing anglophone approaches to Heidegger scholarship have been carried out. Topics treated in these essays are wide-ranging, including examples of (...) English-language Heidegger interpretation, historical and philosophical accounts of the introduction of Heideggerian thought to anglophone academia, and critical analyses of the ways in which Heidegger’s thought has been adopted by Anglo-American commentators. (shrink)

Philosophy of aesthetics and beauty has traditionally prioritized the sense of vision while deprioritizing the more basic-bodily and thus less “noble” sense of touch. This paper examines bodily aspects of how beauty appears in the experience of visual art and motivates the view that touch is fundamental to such experiences. We appeal to Merleau-Ponty to show the relevance given to touch in his phenomenology of aesthetics, to unfold the meaning of touch as “reversible,” and to understand how vision can be (...) conceptualized as a form of touch. Further, we present four cases of feeling touched by beauty in experiences of visual art collected through interviews with art museum visitors. The descriptions of these experiences show that when people open themselves to an artwork they also open themselves to themselves. Based on the qualitative descriptions, we discuss how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of touch is revelatory of the meaning of feeling “touched” in experiences of beauty. (shrink)

This article develops an interpretation and defense of Husserl’s account of the omnitemporality of idealities. I first examine why Husserl rejects the atemporality and temporal individuation of idealities on phenomenological grounds, specifically that these attributions prove countersensical in how they relate idealities to consciousness. As an alternative to these conceptions, I develop a two-sided interpretation of omnitemporality expressed in modal terms of actuality and possibility, the actual referring to appearances in time and the possible, to reactivation at any time. In (...) defense of this interpretation of omnitemporality, I consider influential criticisms against Husserl’s account of idealities as they concern time, particularly whether the historical genesis of idealities compromises their omnitemporality by binding them to time. Ultimately, I argue that the transcendental historicity of idealities, despite being relevant to the question of validity and access, proves indifferent to their omnitemporality. (shrink)

The topic of the present reflection is Christian religious belief. Specifically, we will use Husserlian tools in order to examine the positional nature of this particular type of belief. We will be less interested in the question concerning the success conditions of this experience and more in its noetic structure. According to our proposal, to believe by faith supposes (although it is not exhausted by) accepting the existence of mundane evidence speaking against this fundamental belief. The believer acknowledges the existence (...) of this contradicting en-doxical basis and nevertheless believes what she believes. We will refer to this simultaneous movement of accepting and cancelling as the concessive structure of the religious attitude. The para-doxical movement of experiencing conflicting evidence as being subjectively ineffective is a key component of this attitude. At least some inchoative conflict with the world is required in order for the religious belief to be religious. Lastly, we will try to show that, with a distinctive terminology, the idea that the Christian religious attitude involves a conflict between subjectivity and world is present not only in Kierkegaard but also in phenomenological figures like Scheler and even Husserl. (shrink)

This article critiques Husserl’s idea of grounding through an exploration of his notion of the lifeworld. First, it sketches different senses of the lifeworld in the Crisis and explains in what sense it is taken to be a universal foundation of all sense-formation. Second, it criticizes Husserl’s idea of grounding and shows that it fails because the alleged foundation—namely, the lifeworld as a perceptual world, or rather lifeworldly experience as perception—is inadequately determined. Perception cannot function as a universal foundation because (...) it is always already interpretation. “The groundlessness of sense” means that the process of sense-formation can in no way rest upon an ultimate ground because contingent presuppositions and historical circumstances influence it from the very beginning. The paper concludes by discussing the consequence of this view for the relation between philosophy and sciences. (shrink)

In this paper, my aim is to develop a phenomenological understanding of discrimination from the perspective of the discriminator. Since early existential phenomenology, the phenomenon of discrimination has received a great deal of attention. While much of this work has focused on the experience of the discriminatee, recent scholarship has begun to reflect on the intentional structures on the side of the discriminator. In a contribution to this trend, I argue that our sense of what is (ab)normal plays a constitutively (...) significant role in the reiteration and reinforcement of harmful discriminatory practices. More specifically, I argue that Husserl's distinction between two forms of normality, namely, concordance-normality [Einstimmigkeit] and optimal-normality [Optimalität], is an important tool for illuminating otherwise overlooked aspects of the discriminator's experience. I achieve this by demonstrating how these two notions of normality play distinct constitutive roles when comparing deliberate acts of discrimination committed with malintent, compared with more primordial, habitual, and prereflective expectations which are already discriminatory in nucleo. I argue that at the heart of discriminatory practices there is a naïve, normalizing attempt to stabilize concordance at the expense of critical self-reflection, normative revisions, and enriched horizons of expectation. In doing so, this paper provides a novel and important contribution to philosophical discussions surrounding discrimination. (shrink)