Phenomenological Reading Research Articles

De Nietzsche a Husserl. Una consideración fenomenológica de la fantasía a la luz de la intuición trágica del mundo

In this paper I’m going to develop a phenomenological reading of The Birth of Tragedy of Nietzsche. I will specify some considerations around the conception of Phantasie in Husserl’s phenomenology. In this way, I will propose an interpretation of Phantasie in the light of Nietzsche’s philological considerations, in order to understand the idea of Antiquity in the light of metaphysics-aesthetics perspective synthesized in his world’s tragic intuition. How does the interpretation of Greek Antiquity offer clues to a phenomenology of fantasy? This will be the central issue to be discussed, with the intention to clarify the way of presentation of the phenomenon of tragic art, in so far as expression of life-world of the Greeks.

"Why is it that all the Dangerous Children are Black From the Neighborhoods?": Critical Phenomenology of the Concept of Risk Among Adults Educated at Therapeutic Boarding Schools.

This article is based on in-depth interviews with Israeli adults who had been labeled in their childhood as being at risk and removed from their home to residential care settings (RCS) by court order due to their families' extreme poverty. In seeking their perspective, the present article addresses the pivotal question of how, as adults, they define, experience, and relate to the concept of "at-risk children." The interviews revealed critical phenomenological readings of the notion of risk and the social institution of RCS. Analyzing the critical phenomenology of the interviewees offers research contributions concerning the study of the social construction of the concept of risk, its phenomenology, and the long-term ramifications of labeling children as being at risk and of educating them in RCS.

Polemos, Logos, Plurality

The following examines Hannah Arendt’s interpretations of Greek thought, specifically her phenomenological reading of Homer and Socrates as proto-phenomenological thinkers of objectivity, plurality, and logos. Drawing inspiration from these thinkers, Arendt finds the means of preserving and actualizing plurality as the existential truthfulness that emerges from the conflict in speaking and acting with others. She does this by contrasting how, after the trial and death of Socrates, thinking became professional philosophy and shifted its focus from the reciprocal interdependence of thinking, speaking, and acting well in the polis and towards a reflection on truth, unity, and necessity that takes its start from an ontological order that is either prior to or beyond the world of appearances. Engaging with the literature, this article examines and assesses Arendt’s claims and focuses on the themes of plurality, conflict, and speaking, as set out in her interpretations of Homer and Socrates.

TRIPS Through A Military Looking Glass

The paper draws on an argument from Hanns Ullrich that the Agreement on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) suffers for a legitimacy gap. This gap takes the form of an external conditioning of states’ sovereignty over innovation in markets. The paper argues there is a less-discussed and somewhat darker legitimacy gap of TRIPS. This gap relates to the US national security state (NSS) and its use of intellectual property to regulate globally innovation in weapons systems. The paper traces the links between the NSS, intellectual property and weapons innovation from World War II to the present day. TRIPS has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the NSS because it has failed to hold back China’s innovation in defense-sensitive areas such as 5G technology. Drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt, the paper offers a phenomenological reading of the NSS’ view of legitimacy. The paper finishes with an examination of the implications of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction for the future of intellectual property and the US-China relationship.

Remediation, virality and affect: a phenomenological reading into the Alan Kurdi Image

ABSTRACT On 2 September 2015, Alan Kurdi’s image went viral on the social media and immediately shook the world. This paper concerns not so much with the referent as with the capacity of image to represent. What in an image endows it the capacity to shame entire humanity, heterogeneous as it is? To further complicate, how does a digital image – a conglomeration of pixilated dots, devoid of any materiality whatsoever – in its singularity generate ‘affect’, universalizable and synchronic across cultures? When we recycle contents from the ‘traditional’ media to the ‘new’ media, we tend to convey something buffer to what the text in its singularity conveys. Using Kurdi’s image as a case study, this paper illustrates how the politics of ‘remediation’ – the buffer – immanent in digitally viral images informs our practices of spectatorship. It engages in sustained, critical questioning of what differences Kurdi’s image makes in terms of the perception and performativity of refugeehood (as a site of knowledge). In other words, how does this image, among others, emerge as the face of refugeehood, or better still, the Syrian crisis? What ‘new’ is being brought in and afforded by the image? How do we interpret the emergence of an image as the face of an ‘event’, and what ontological implications does it entail?

Pensamiento crítico y lectura. Una mirada desde la obra de Guillermo Hoyos-Vásquez

En este artículo de reflexión se propone un modelo filosófico y pedagógico de pensamiento crítico para una escuela impertinente. Para ello nos valemos de la lectura que hizo Guillermo Hoyos-Vásquez de la fenomenología, el idealismo alemán y la teoría crítica frankfurtiana para la situación latinoamericana. En efecto, el pensador colombiano ha propuesto una manera impertinente, crítica y utópica de comprender la filosofía en vistas de la educación escolar y profesional. Estas se han enfocado en satisfacer las demandas del sistema económico-político, han acudido a un concepto cognitivista de pensamiento crítico como una herramienta pertinente para el logro de nuestras utopías sociales y han ignorado el ethos de nuestros estudiantes y su situación existencial.

Imperial (S)Kin: The Orthography of the Wake in Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black

Abstract The publication of Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black has placed the novel among other works of history and art, which recall the material and epistemic violence of institutional racism and the lasting trauma of its legacy. Thus by interlacing, within the context of black critical theory, Yogita Goyal’s and Laura T. Murphy’s examining of the neo-slave narrative with Christina Sharpe’s conceptualization of the wake and Alexander G. Weheliye’s notion of habeas viscus as critical frames for the discussion of racialized subjectivity, I consider how Edugyan’s use of the conventions of Victorian adventure literature and the slave narrative rethinks the entanglements between the imperial commodification of life and the scientific agenda of natural history. Given how the narrative emphasizes the somatic register and its epidermal terms as a scene of meaning, I bring together Frantz Fanon’s idea of epidermalization, Steven Connor’s phenomenological reading of the skin, and Calvin L. Warren’s reasoning about blackness in an attempt to highlight the metalepsis resulting from the novel’s use of the hot air-balloon and the octopus as dermatropes that cast the empire as simultaneously a dysfunctional family and a scientific laboratory. Loaded into the skin as a master trope is the conceptual cross-over between consciousness and conscience, whose narrative performance in the novel nourishes the affective labour of its reader as an agent of memory.

Sonic Space and Echoes of the Flesh

This essay argues that the cinematic experience for audiences be reconsidered as a cinesomatic experience. Theorists such as Vivian Sobchack (1992; 2000; 2005) and Jennifer Barker (2009) have done much to conceptualise and theorise a sensory, embodied experience of cinema. These scholars, mainly drawing from either a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology or a Spinozist/Deleuzian theory of affect, have led the wave of new writings probing the ways in which audience engagement with film is corporeal. Their work explores cinema in terms of visual and haptic engagements, congruous with a broader move in scholarship towards the sensorial. However, despite the growth of embodied film theory in recent years, there is an even greater need to take the sensorial model of cinema spectatorship to film sound. This essay addresses cinema sound in specifically corporeal terms, demonstrating how audience experiences of film sound can be reconsidered as cinesomatic. By drawing a textual and phenomenological reading of the sound design in Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013), this essay aims to reveal new insights into the materially rich experience of a film’s soundtrack and demonstrate how a multiplicity of ‘narratives’ converge during and beyond the cinema encounter.

A Phenomenological Reading of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

The articles provides a phenomenological reading of the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics and its answer to the measurement problem, or the question of “why only one of a wave function’s probable values is observed when the system is measured.” Transcendental-phenomenological and hermeneutic-phenomenological approaches are employed. The project comprises four parts. Parts one and two review MWI and the standard (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum mechanics. Part three reviews the phenomenologies. Part four deconstructs the hermeneutics of MWI. It agrees with the confidence the theory derives from its (1) unforgiving appropriation of the Schrödinger equation and (2) association of branching universes with the evolution of the wave function insofar as that understanding comes from the formalism itself. Part four also reveals the hermeneutical shortcomings of the standard interpretation.

So near, so far, so what is social distancing? A fundamental ontological account of a mobile place brand

This paper offers a social phenomenological reading of the globally binding practice of ‘social distancing’ in light of the precautionary measures against the spreading of the Covid-19 virus. Amid speculation about the far-reaching effects of temporarily applicable measures and foresights about the advent of an ethos that has been heralded by the media as the ‘new normal’, the ubiquitous phenomenon of social distancing calls for a fundamental ontological elucidation. The purported hermeneutic that is situated in the broader place branding and experiential marketing literatures places Covid-19 in the shoes of Being, and, therefore, imagines how Being would behave ontologically if it were a virus. By arguing that the virus does operate like Being, five theses are put forward as experiential interpretive categories with regard to the ontological status of Covid-19. The adopted approach makes the following contributions to the extant literature: First, it addresses a wholly new phenomenon in place branding, namely a pre-branded place whose meaning is non-negotiable, globally applicable and seemingly equivalent to pure void. Second, it advances the application of phenomenological research in place branding and experiential consumption by highlighting the aptness of the so far peripheral (in the marketing discipline) strand of Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Third, it extends the meaning of place in the place branding literature, by showing how spatialization is the outcome of temporalization, in line with the adopted phenomenological perspective.

What is Existential Educational Encounter?

This paper aims to clarify the meaning of the pedagogical concept of encounter by providing an overview of its use from the historical foundations of the concept in Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s (1903 to 1991) philosophy to contemporary phenomenological readings by Maxine Greene, Donald Vandenberg and Robyn Harrison. The outcome is a critical analysis and evaluation of the significance of the concept in educational contexts. The aims of the paper are as follows: a) to articulate the educational significance of the concept of encounter, and b) to clarify its relationship to the humanistic concept of formation (or unfolding; Bildung), in order to establish the tension between Bildung-theory and the existential theory of human formation. The paper claims that, for a more elaborated understanding of the human educative process, the tension between the processes of encounter and Bildung should be seen as the core tension behind the holistic view of becoming human. Also, c) for an analysis of the Anglo-American reception of the concept, a phenomenological view of the encounter as a transcendental aspect of a learning process will be made in order to gain a wider view of the concept.

Beyond drone vision: the embodied telepresence of first-person-view drone flight

ABSTRACT Drones, no matter whether military or civilian, have been widely theorized as a media technology. An important notion for conceptualizing the particular scopic regimes of drones has been “drone vision.” Recently, some scholars have suggested to shift the attention toward the “more-than-optical”, “more-than-visual” or “synesthetic” characteristics of drones. Drawing on a (post-)phenomenological reading of First Person View (FPV) drone flight, this article asks, firstly, how the “more-than” component in the notion “more-than-optical” emerges in the embodied actions and perceptions of amateur drone users, and secondly, how these experiences might be conceptualized. As a key concept for my reflection, I take up the notion of telepresence, which emerged in the discourse on remote control and teleoperation technologies and finally found its way as an artistic strategy and popular motif into our contemporary socio-technical imaginaries. This article suggests first steps toward an empirical and theoretical exploration of the heterogeneous technogene sensations of drones.

Phenomenology and functional analysis. A functionalist reading of Husserlian phenomenology

In the article I discuss functionalist interpretations of Husserlian phenomenology. The first one was coined in the discussion between Hubert Dreyfus and Ronald McIntyre. They argue that Husserl’s phenomenology shares similarities with computational functionalism, and the key similarity is between the concept of noema and the concept of mental representation. I show the weaknesses of that reading and argue that there is another available functionalist reading of Husserlian phenomenology. I propose to shift perspective and approach the relation between phenomenology and functionalism from a methodological perspective, specifically taking into account the functionalist explanatory strategy called functional analysis. I discuss the notion of function in Husserl’s works and Husserl’s idea of functional phenomenology. The key argument I develop is that in functional phenomenology we can find an explanatory strategy which is analogous to the strategy of functional decomposition used in functional analysis. I conclude that the proposed functionalist reading of phenomenology opens a new approach to the integration of phenomenology with cognitive sciences.

So Near, so Far, so What Is Social Distancing? a Fundamental Ontological Account of a Mobile Place Brand

This paper offers a social phenomenological reading of the globally binding practice of ‘social distancing’ in light of the precautionary measures against the spreading of the COVID-19 virus. Amid speculation about the far-reaching effects of temporarily applicable measures and foresights about the advent of an ethos that has been heralded by the media as the ‘new normal’, the ubiquitous phenomenon of social distancing calls for a fundamental ontological elucidation. The purported hermeneutic that is situated in the broader place branding and experiential marketing literatures places COVID-19 in the shoes of Being, and, therefore, imagines how Being would behave ontologically if it were a virus. By positing that the virus does operate like Being, five these are formulated as experiential interpretive categories with regard to the ontological status of COVID-19. The adopted approach makes the following contributions to the extant literature: First, it addresses a wholly new phenomenon in place branding, namely a pre-branded place that is non-negotiable, globally applicable and seemingly equivalent to pure void. Second, it advances the application of phenomenological research in experiential consumption by highlighting the aptness of the so far peripheral (in the marketing discipline) strand of Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Third, it expands the notion of place in the place branding literature, by showing how spatialization is the outcome of temporalization, in line with the adopted phenomenological perspective.

The Promise of the World: Towards a Transcendental History of Trust

This paper aims at a phenomenological analysis of trust. We argue that trust has a transcendental dimension in that it functions as a condition of possibility of the basic ego-world relation. Tacit for the most part in ordinary experience, it comes forth in its problematicity in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. People experiencing psychic disturbances lose trust in the continuity and the mineness of lived experience and conceive the world as uninhabitable. In order to address the transcendental problem of trust, we first carry out a static analysis of trust as perceptual faith and we show that it is founded in the functioning of a transcendental ground. In a second step, we proceed with a genetic analysis drawing on Husserl’s manuscripts on the awakening of the self, on early childhood, and Richir’s recent phenomenological readings of D. W. Winnicott. We situate the archaic experience of trust in an originarily intersubjective and affective dimension, where the parental environment functions as a transcendental matrix for the early development of a yet inchoative self. By doing so, we aim to sketch out the major lines of a transcendental history of trust in the early stages of human experience.

Philosophy as a Path of Liberation: A Phenomenological Reading of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

O artigo apresenta a interpretação fenomenológica de Heidegger da alegoria da caverna de Platão relatada em sua obra A república. Trata-se de uma análise originalmente conduzida no tocante à metodologia utilizada. Ela se propõe refletir sobre temas evocados pela alegoria como verdade, ideia, liberdade e morte, no intuito de superar as representações modernas dos mesmos na direção do seu sentido originário, com o propósito de reencontrá-los na experiência do pensamento grego. O estudo retoma a análise de Heidegger demonstrando que o movimento de acessar a experiência originária da formação dos conceitos constitui-se na liberdade humana do pensar e na tarefa do filósofo como libertador. A análise de Heidegger encontra na sua obra Ser e Verdade. As discussões são amparadas pelos estudos de seus principais comentadores. O trabalho indica que a filosofia é, em sua experiência própria, possibilidade da liberdade, já indicada na filosofia de Platão.

Reading in Phenomenology: Heidegger’s Approach to Religious Experience in St. Paul and St. Augustine

AbstractThe importance of religious figures in Heidegger’s early development has long been understood. Beginning especially in the WS-1920, with the Phenomenology of Religious Life lectures, figures such as Paul and Augustine played essential roles in his early attempt to move beyond the legacy of Cartesian thought. Despite appearing to secularize these accounts, Heidegger nonetheless implies that it is because of their religiosity, and not in spite of it, that they are of phenomenological interest. For this reason, the exact status of religious descriptions in his phenomenology has been a source of contention. My argument in this paper, is that this status is best understood by turning to Heidegger’s early approach to phenomenological reading. This approach, I argue, is grounded in a performative model of language, exemplified in Destruction [Destruktion], and defines the limits within which he can engage with the religious character of historical texts.

Review of Jens Kjaerulff. “Situating time: New technologies at work, a perspective from Alfred Gell’s oeuvre”

Review of Jens Kjaerulff. “Situating time: New technologies at work, a perspective from Alfred Gell’s oeuvre”

Arendt in the refugee camp: The political agency of world-building

Refugee camps are frequently conceived as spaces in which social and political life is reduced to biological concerns of survival or ‘bare’ life. Yet, for researchers who focus on life in the camp as it is lived, through material adaption, social negotiation and resistance, this Agambenian perspective is unsatisfactory. Instead, a relation is made apparent between practises of everyday life and the manifestation of a politics. This paper argues for the importance of Hannah Arendt's writings for a new understanding of how refugee camp inhabitants can develop and sustain political agency. First, it will highlight the relation by observations and analysis of ‘the jungle’ in Calais, France. This unofficial camp, although short-lived, has influenced a broad spectrum of research including examination of spatial political practice. Second, applying a phenomenological reading of Arendt's work, I argue that political agency emerges through the concept of world-building. World-building results from the conjunction of human activities – from the quotidian, like labour and work, to the exceptional cases of action – and their orientation towards a specific type of visibility. World-building manifests as camp inhabitants erect spaces of meaning that engage a plurality of persons, transforming them into political agents.

A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology by Robert B. Brandom

Reviewed by: A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology by Robert B. Brandom Rolf-Peter Horstmann Robert B. Brandom. A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 836. Cloth, $45.00. In order to be successful in philosophy, you must have the right kind of followers. Ideally, they should be able to perform either or both of these tasks: (1) to translate your teachings into an idiom that is accessible to an audience coming from different intellectual backgrounds, and/or (2) to integrate your philosophical message into a contemporary discourse in such a way that it proves to be productively connectable to what is discussed there. Kant was lucky enough to have had such ideal followers in abundance, both as exegetical interpreters and as modernizers of his ideas. They stretch from the post-Kantian idealists via the Neo-Kantians to twentieth-century epistemologists, moral philosophers, and aesthetical theorists. The result is a very vivid presence of Kant's ideas throughout the (academic) world. The opposite is true with those post-Kantian philosophers who came to be labeled "German idealists." The major figures of this cluster (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) had the bad luck either to have had few followers (as in Fichte's and Schelling's case) or (as in Hegel's case) to have been followed by a bunch of unconvincing disciples (e.g. Rosenkranz and Michelet), who were not sufficiently talented or prepared for the task of maintaining the philosophical legacy of their paragon in a different cultural climate. It was this unfortunate accident that can be partly blamed for the prejudiced reception of Hegel's, as well as Fichte's and Schelling's, doctrines on both sides of the Atlantic divide, denying them intellectual respectability and stigmatizing them as hopelessly obscure and not worth the trouble. This situation has changed considerably in the last seventy years, especially for Hegel's work, which draws new attention inspired by the scholarly efforts of people like Michael Theunissen, Dieter Henrich, Jean Hyppolite, Bernard Bourgeois, Franco Chiereghin, and Claudio Cesa on the Continental side, Charles Taylor, Michael Inwood, Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, and others on the English-speaking side. These persons have succeeded in initiating what could be called a new Hegel-renaissance. In particular, their efforts helped to lift the discussion of Hegel's work to a new level with respect to five important aspects: (1) exegetical transparency, (2) historical accuracy, (3) problem-awareness (Problembewusstsein), (4) intelligible reasoning, and (5) critical assessment. Robert Brandom's monumental book A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology is a brilliant testament to what has been achieved so far, at least as far as Hegel's epistemology is concerned. Though it is literally a monument by virtue of its size, it also is a monument to what can or should be done with Hegel's philosophical œuvre in order to keep his way of thinking alive in a contemporary context. According to Brandom, Hegel's Phenomenology must be understood as "a story about the development of… higher-level concepts in terms of which his readers… can be brought to comprehend discursive activity in general" (103, cf. 636). He takes this story to be an allegorical presentation of a theory about the establishment of conceptual content. Consequently, he declares right at the beginning that "The defining subject that serves as both lens and filter for the present account is conceptual content" (2), where conceptual content, as it turns out, has to be understood as the result of our normative practices that consist in an intricate interplay between normative attitudes and statuses. Although this is admittedly not the most obvious characterization of Hegel's phenomenological project, it is fascinating to witness Brandom's success in presenting one of the most penetrating and illuminating readings of central parts of the Phenomenology to date, all while relying on his rather un-Hegelian framework. One cannot but deeply admire the virtues Brandom's work puts on display in an exemplary way. Among these, his profound familiarity with even the minutest details of (large parts of) Hegel's text, the vast knowledge of both historical and...