Bergson argues that there is an incompatibility between free will and determinism: while free will has a dimension of creation, of invention, determinism corresponds to the idea that the future is fixed in advance by laws. In addition, he rejects determinism. According to him, the singularity of our deep-seated psychic states makes that their evolution cannot be governed by laws. However, Bergson does not defend classical indeterminism because it reduces free will to a choice between alternative possibilities, that is to (...) say between pre-fixed futures. Such a conception does not take into account the creative dimension of free will. In fact, Bergson develops an original form of indeterminism based on a certain conception of causation. For determinism and classical indeterminism, causation is always the actualization of a pre-fixed virtual reality. For Bergson, causation can also be a creation, that is, the formation of something which is not pre-fixed. (shrink)

Our reasons for avoiding death are manifold, encompassing among others, motives that are personal, political, and historical. Still, are there ways that we might use words to overcome these common everyday aversions to death and the dead through another modality of language, that of poetry for example? Can the poetic word get us to acknowledge the particulars of death despite the various reasons we have to disavow it? Might we use language not simply grasp death abstractly but instead to realize (...) what death means in its awful particularity? These questions are prompted by Aimé Césaire’s poerty and his prose, and by his elegy for Emmett Till in particular. Through his writings and his political work, one of Césaire’s key aims was to get people to acknowledge what they would prefer to avoid. Césaire’s work, both his poetry and prose, urges readers to see the things they would prefer not to see and to show us how language stakes us to the world in all its terrifying awfulness and wondrous splendor, despite our desperate attempts to avoid this realization. This essay is divided into two parts. The first part looks at how this problem of alienation and the need to acknowle this alienation motivates Césaire’s writing more generally, focusing on the ten years between 1945 and 1955. In order to consider how alienation and acknowledgement work in this celebrated text, I consider related works and their contexts from the period from 1950-1956, including his famous letter of resignation from the French Communist Party. This sets the stage for the reading of Césaire’s Ferraments provided in the second section. The second part examines how and why Césaire sought acknowledgement for Emmett Till’s brutal murder through his poetry, focusing specifically on his poem “…On the State of the Union” from his 1960 collection Ferraments. (shrink)

A book review of Léa Veinstein, Les philosophes lisent Kafka: Benjamin, Arendt, Adorno, Anders.

In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir traveled to the United States for a four-month stay, during which she toured the country extensively. Her copious notes taken during this time eventually became the travelogue, America Day by Day as well as a piece written for the May 25, 1947 edition of the New York Times Magazine, “An Existentialist Looks at Americans.” In both of these writings, Beauvoir offers an astute criticism of American culture from a foreign perspective. This paper explores Beauvoir’s treatment (...) of American abstraction and race with three goals in mind: first, to understand the American relationship to time and money as abstractions. Ignoring the past and projecting an idealistic future, leads to a strange kind of fatalism and lack of passion that profoundly impacts White and Black Americans but in distinctively different ways. The second part of the paper explores these differences through an analysis of how White Americans attempt to live with “good” consciences through the positing of and attachment to abstract values and things. This attitude, in turn, produces a largely instrumental and racist treatment of many populations, in particular, Black Americans. The final section focuses on how Beauvoir confronts the fact of her own whiteness, and in so doing undergoes the movement of race as an abstract theoretical category to one of lived embodiment. (shrink)

Hermeneutic philosophy, and Paul Ricoeur’s formulation of hermeneutics in particular, faces a serious challenge, not from external sources, but from internal proponents of the program. In what might be called the Collapse Challenge, Ricoeur’s understanding of the hermeneutic circle is criticized for making use of structuralist methods that are no longer considered viable. Rather than look to replace Ricoeur’s work with an external model, the present essay draws on his late model of translation to suggest two viable paths forward beyond (...) the Collapse Challenge. To develop these paths, the essay gives two concrete cases, one using Confucian philosophy, which is comparative, another using Aztec philosophy, which is syncretic. (shrink)

This article offers an encompassing interpretation of Paul Ricœur’s reception of Max Weber’s sociology. Three main domains in which Ricœur redeployed and revised insights from Weber are examined: political responsibility and the definition of the state, significant categories for understanding social interaction and the social ontology implied by this view on action and, finally, the role of explanation in the interpretive social sciences. As a whole, this article argues that Weber was a significant interlocutor of Ricœur on a number of (...) significant themes in the philosopher’s work. In particular, the article profiles the Weberian aspect of Ricœur’s social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Phenomenology is not dead yet, at least not from the viewpoint of the “phenomenology-friendly”approach to the mind that has recently emerged in cognitive science: the “enactive approach” or “enactivism.” This approach takes the mental capacities, such as perception, consciousness and cognition, to be the result of the interaction between the brain, the body and the environment. In this, it offers an alternative to reductionist explanations of the mental in terms of brain activities, like cognitivism, especially computationalism, while overcoming the Cartesian (...) dualism mind-world. What makes this approach so fruitful for a renewed philosophical consideration is its ongoing reference to Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies. It was said to be “consistent with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point,” to be the “revival” of phenomenology, even a “Kuhnian revolution.” Evan Thompson argues that this approach “uses phenomenology to explicate mind science and mind science to explicate phenomenology. Concepts such as lived body, organism, bodily selfhood and autonomous agency, the intentional arc and dynamic sensorimotor dependencies, can thus become mutually illuminating rather than merely correlational concepts.” The phenomenological works seem to strike a chord with the enactive theorists. Are we witnessing the dawn of “The new Science of the Mind”? (shrink)

On April 22, 1922, the Societé française de Philosophie hosted Albert Einstein for a discussion of the theory of relativity. In the course of this discussion, Henri Bergson, who was at that time writing Duration and Simultaneity, which explored some of the philosophical implications of Einstein's theory, was asked to share his thoughts. The resulting remarks offer a glimpse into Bergson's analysis of the concept of simultaneity, and Einstein's brief reply reveals his insistence that time itself, not just "the physicist's (...) time," is relative. (shrink)

A correction has been made to: Bar, Roi. The Forgotten Phenomenology: “Enactive Perception” in the Eyes of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, v. 28, n. 1, p. 53-72, june 2020.The incorrect abstract was included with the original publication of DOI 10.5195/jffp.2020.928The original article has been updated to reflect this change.

This paper makes a comparison between enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy. Enactivism is a recent development in philosophy of mind and cognitive science that generally defines cognition in terms of a subject’s natural interactions with the physical environment. In recent years, enactivists have been focusing on social and ethical relations by introducing the concept of participatory sensemaking, according to which ethical know-how spontaneously emerges out of natural relations of participation and communication, that is, through the exchange of knowledge. This paper will (...) argue first that, although participatory sensemaking is a valuable concept in that it offers a practical and realistic way of understanding ethics, it nevertheless downplays the significance of otherness for understanding ethics. I will argue that Levinas’ work demonstrates in turn that otherness is significant for ethics in that we cannot completely anticipate others through participation or know-how. We cannot live the other’s experiences or suffering, which makes ethical relation so difficult and serious. I will argue next that enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy nevertheless do not exclude each other insofar they share a similar concept of subjectivity as a quality of naturally interacting with the external world to gain knowledge. Finally, I will argue that enactivism’s notion of participatory sensemaking also offers something which Levinas’ insufficiently defines, namely a concept of social justice, based on equality and participation, that emerges out of natural relations. (shrink)

Jakob von Uexküll’s account of Umwelt has been proposed as a mediating concept to bridge the gap between ecological psychology’s realism about environmental information and enactivism’s emphasis on the organism’s active role in constructing the meaningful world it inhabits. If successful, this move would constitute a significant step towards establishing a single ecological-enactive framework for cognitive science. However, Uexküll’s thought itself contains different perspectives that are in tension with each other, and the concept of Umwelt is developed in representationalist terms (...) that conflict with the commitments of both enactivism and ecological psychology. One central issue shared by all these approaches is the problem of how a living being experiences its environment. In this paper, we will look at Uexküll’s reception in French philosophy and highlight the different ways in which the concept of Umwelt functions in the work of Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis helps clarify different aspects of Uexküll’s thought and the deeper philosophical implications of importing his concepts into embodied cognitive science. This paper is part of a recent trend in which enactivism engages with continental philosophy in a way that both deepens and transcends the traditional links to phenomenology, including most recently the thought of Georg W. F. Hegel and Gilbert Simondon. However, no more than a brief outline and introduction to the potentials and challenges of this complex conceptual intersection can be given here. Our hope is that it serves to make more explicit the philosophical issues that are at stake for cognitive science in the question of experienced environments, while charting a useful course for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a revaluation of Paul Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity in light of what Miriam Kyselo has coined “the body-social problem” in enactivism. It is my contention that while phenomenological perspectives upon the body and the self are considered relevant in enactivism, the hermeneutical, discursive facets are understood as a less essential facet of the self, for instance as the self’s reflexive side, that gives expression to an experiential self. Yet, it is in language that (...) the self is addressed by others and that the self reflects upon itself and understands itself. Especially in order to understand aspects of identity which are of importance for the social situation of the self, such as gender, the way we are addressed by others and address ourselves by means of language need to be taken into account. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical discussion of the views of Merleau-Ponty and contemporary enactivism concerning the phenomenological dimension of the continuity between life and mind. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s views are at odds with those of enactivists. Merleau-Ponty only applied phenomenological descriptions to the life-worlds of sentient animals with sensorimotor systems, contrary to those enactivists who apply them to all organisms. I argue that we should follow Merleau-Ponty on this point, as the use of phenomenological concepts to describe the “experience” (...) of creatures with no phenomenal consciousness has generated confusion about the role of phenomenology in enactivism and prompted some enactivists to ignore or turn away from phenomenology. Further, Merleau-Ponty also emphasizes the stark distinction between the vital order of animals and the human order to a greater degree than many phenomenologically inspired enactivists. I discuss his view in connection with recent research in developmental and comparative psychology. Despite the striking convergence of Merleau-Ponty’s visionary thought with the most recent findings, I argue that he somewhat overstates the difference between human experience and cognition, and that of our closest animal kin. I outline a developmental-phenomenological account of how the child enters the human order in the first years of life, thereby further mitigating the stark difference between orders. This results in a modified Merleau-Pontian version of the phenomenological dimension of life-mind continuity which I recommend to enactivism. (shrink)

Cet article vise à discuter le rôle de l’altérité dans l’approche énactiviste. L’énactivisme considère la cognition comme un processus fondamentalement autonome, c’est-à-dire, qui n’est pas déterminé par des informations dites « externes » ni par des représentations issues de la manipulation symbolique. Une manière de comprendre l’autonomie met l’accent sur la fermeture du système cognitif, ce qui pourrait restreindre la notion d’altérité. Toutefois, nous aimerions proposer une lecture alternative de l’autonomie dans l’énactivisme, qui souligne son ouverture à l’imprévisible, et ainsi (...) rapprocher cette lecture de certaines compréhensions de l’altérité, notamment celle de Martin Buber. Par son refus de binarismes et son choix d’un chemin intermédiaire entre l’objectivisme et le subjectivisme, le dialogue phénoménologique de Buber et, plus spécialement, sa caractérisation de la relation Je-Tu nous semblent pertinentes à une conception énactiviste de l’altérité. (shrink)

Enactivism maintains that the mind is not produced and localized inside the head but is distributed along and through brain-body-environment interactions. This idea of an intrinsic relationship between the agent and the world derives from the classical phenomenological investigations of the body. This paper discusses similarities and differences between enactivism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology, which is not usually considered as a paradigmatic example of the relationship between phenomenological investigations and enactivism. After a preliminary analysis of the three principal varieties of (...) enactivism, I will present Sartre’s account of the body, addressing some key points that can be related to the current enactivist positions: perception-action unity, anti-representationalism, anti-internalism, organism-environment interaction, and sense-making cognition. Despite some basic similarities, enactivism and Sartre’s phenomenology move in different directions as to how these concepts are developed. Nevertheless, I will suggest that Sartre’s phenomenology is useful to the enactivist approaches to provide a broader and more complete analysis of consciousness and cognition, by developing a pluralist account of corporeality, enriching the investigation of the organism-environment coupling through an existentialist perspective, and reincluding the concept of subjectivity without the hypostatisation of an I-subject detached from body and world. (shrink)