Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 2, February 2022.

With the exception of James Ostrow’s 1990 study, social sensitivity has received scarce attention in philosophy, whilst it has become an important area of research in social and clinical psychology, where it is commonly known as interpersonal sensitivity. The latter is usually understood as a form of social skill to appropriately recognise and decode the appearance and behaviour of others. However, this view suffers from conceptual limitations in that it tends to reduce social sensitivity to standardised skilful behaviour. Drawing on (...) Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, I disambiguate social sensitivity from social skills, arguing that the former builds on the receptivity of habit to beliefs and cognitive dissonance. In this revised sense, social sensitivity informs processes of attitude change that challenge ingrained dispositions and potentially defy social codes and expectations. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 725-739, June 2022.

Social sensitivity is a crucial aspect of interpersonal relationships, as it is intrinsic to the understanding of other selves as subjects situated in a social world. In revitalizing such a concept in the philosophical literature, this article examines the relation between habit, attention, and critical self‐awareness that lies at the core of social sensitivity. On the one hand, I reconsider the so‐called “passivity” of habit and tackle the role of attention as the power of varying point of view. On the (...) other hand, I contrast Husserl's view of attentiveness with Murdoch's account of loving attention, arguing that social sensitivity centers on a type of striving that is closer to Husserl's methodology than Murdoch's approach to moral perfectionism. (shrink)

Since Gayle Salamon’s 2018 article “What is Critical about Critical Phenomenology?”, phenomenologists and critical theorists have offered various responses to the question this title poses. In doing this, they articulated the following considerations: is renewed criticality targeting the phenomenological method itself, does it expand its subject matter to marginalized experiences, does it retool key phenomenological concepts? One aspect of this debate that has been left under-interrogated, however, is the word “phenomenology” itself. There is after all another question to ask in (...) this context: what is phenomenological about critical phenomenology? Many avenues of response are of course possible. Phenomenology could most broadly be meant as an approach that concerns itself with what is given in experience in order to describe the structures of that givenness. From a Husserlian perspective, pure phenomenology is the science which concerns itself with phenomena in the full and diverse sense of the word—not as understood by specific natural or human sciences. What is distinctive of phenomenology is thus not what subset or type of phenomena it is interested in but how it relates to them, which, as Husserl introduces Ideas I, happens “in a completely different attitude.”. (shrink)