Historical Phenomenology Research Articles

In favor of (plain) phenomenology

Plain phenomenology explains theoretically salient mental or psychological distinctions with an appeal to their first-person applications. But it does not assume (as does heterophenomenology) that warrant for such first-person judgment is derived from an explanatory theory constructed from the third-person perspective. Discussions in historical phenomenology can be treated as plain phenomenology. This is illustrated by a critical consideration of Brentano’s account of consciousness, drawing on some ideas in early Husserl. Dennett’s advocacy of heterophenomenology on the grounds of its supposed “neutrality” does not show it is preferable to plain phenomenology. In fact the latter is more neutral in ways we ought to want, and permits a desirable (and desirably critical) use of first-person reflection that finds no place in the former.

What are “Things” Saying in Renaissance Studies?

AbstractThis essay takes up the recent turn to “things” in Renaissance literary studies and attempts to adjudicate the kinds of advances this turn might offer beyond the New Historicist project of the 1980s and 1990s. Offering thumbnail sketches of key contributions by variously Marxist or materialist critics and also by the eclectic group of approaches that name themselves “historical phenomenology,” it argues that the new volubility of “things” in our discipline augurs a return to the urgent theoretical questions of the early 1980s on the interrelation between form and history. In order to keep this field of possibilities open to further experimentation, the essay concludes by introducing readers to two theorists whose work shapes the current conversation, anthropologist William Pietz and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, and suggests some ways in which their work might further be used by literary critics and historians.

The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

AbstractThis essay provides an overview of the central concerns of the emerging field of historical phenomenology in Renaissance/Early Modern studies. It compares this new scholarship with the older historicism of the 1930s–1960s and concludes by posing questions about the direction of the new scholarship and the challenges it faces.

An Historical Phenomenology of Mean and Median

Using Freudenthal’s method of historical phenomenology, the history of statistics was investigated as a source of inspiration for instructional design. Based on systematically selected historical examples, hypotheses were formulated about how students could be supported in learning to reason with particular statistical concepts and graphs. Such a historical study helped to distinguish different aspects and levels of understanding of concepts and helped us as instructional designers to look through the eyes of students. In this paper, we focus on an historical phenomenology of mean and median, and give examples of how hypotheses stemming from the historical phenomenology led to the design of instructional activities used for teaching experiments in grades 7 and 8 (12–14-years old).

Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the early modern passions: essays in the cultural history of emotion, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, pp. xv, 384, illus., (paperback 0-8122-1872-8).

Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the early modern passions: essays in the cultural history of emotion, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, pp. xv, 384, illus., (paperback 0-8122-1872-8).

Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (review)

Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. 2002. Heading Modern Passions: Essays in Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $47.96 hc. $19.96 sc. 392 pp.Reading Modern Passions, a collection of essays edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, signals its place on cutting edge of a paradigm shift in modern studies with simple fact that, in a volume devoted to study of in period, psychoanalysis is not mentioned until page 13, where it is subordinated to historical and dismissed without much ado on grounds of its essentialist logic. Instead of familiar Freudian and Lacanian narratives, volume presents essays that call on cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and phenomenology to emphasize ways in which early modern taxonomies of ... differ from our current categories, but also how they continue to script our debates about emotions as objects of study in humanities, sciences, and social sciences (1). Although essays range broadly across disciplinary and geographical fields, most contribute in some way to establishing historicity of inwardness. Thus, most important insight offered by this collection is that early modern psychology only partially shares priority we place on inwardness, alongside very different conceptions of emotions as physical, environmental, and external phenomena (15).The introduction provides a very useful summary to contemporary debates about emotional states and their classification. Acknowledging significant differences across disciplines about nature of human emotion, editors note that there is little agreement on what constitutes cardinal or core emotions, on how to rank emotions on a scale of complexity, on which creatures experience them, or on whether emotions are more pancultural than they are local and specific (3). They cite work of cultural linguist Anne Wierzbicka as offering a particularly useful approach for cultural historians like themselves, since her focus on language and emotion scripts acknowledges both universal and trans-cultural aspects of as well as their differing manifestations in different cultures.Essays in volume are divided into three sections: one on Early Modern Emotion Scripts, which charts ways in which modern and modern representations of differ; another, Historical Phenomenology, which seeks to recreate modern world in which mind, body, and environment were inextricably intertwined; and finally, Disciplinary Boundaries, which suggest some ways of understanding methodological differences among different fields that study human emotion. As such, they seek first to establish differences between modern and modern experience of emotion, and then to suggest how similarities between two can shed light on contemporary difficulties in cross-disciplinary understanding.The first section begins with an essay by Richard Strier, Against Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther, Shakespeare to Herbert, which argues that dominant value placed upon control of by reason in Western tradition is significantly disrupted by a longstanding tradition of of passion (23). Michael Schoenfeldt follows with an essay,'Commotion Strange': Passion in Paradise Lost, which similarly argues that Milton's depiction of pre-lapsarian human life is influenced by both condemnation and praise of passions. Schoenfeldt sees Milton's equivocal and situational attitude toward as typical of modern inconsistency, and notes that he seems to endorse both the rigorous self-control promised by classical ethics and sacrificial compassion at core of Christian affect (67). Zirka Z. Filipczak, in Poses and Passions: Mona Lisa's 'Closely Folded' Hands, moves volume from texts to art history to argue that in modern period, hands were a more common register of states of feeling than Mona Lisa's more scrutinized smile. …

Fenomenologia e Hermenêutica das tradições

Summary This paper tries to analyse the historical and present contribution of phenomenology to the hermeneutics of traditions. This attempt is achieved by retracing, in main lines, the history of phenomenological movement, his birth, constitution and evolution. In this proposal, it is showed how, by his both internal and external critics, classic phenomenology is moved to open itself to other contemporary trends of thought, namely hermeneutics and philosophy of language, and, in dialogue with these and with the human sciences, to transform itself in a more fruitful way. This is truth, first of all, in respect of Husserl’s·thought, which evolves from static phenomenology, centered in the analysis of the noetic-noematic intentional correlation from the point of view of a transcendental idealism, to genetic and historical phenomenology, based on the “Ur-Impression” of the living-present, as the founding phenomenon-event of all meaning’s constitution. A decisive point is made by Heidegger in stressing the hermeneutic, discursive and historical character of all ontological understanding. This allows emphasizing the question of the sense formation (Sinnbildung), which precedes and enables all symbolic and signic institution of meaning (Sinnstiftung), therefore providing a guiding line for search on the topic of the historical constitution of language and traditions.

Humoring the body: emotions and the Shakespearean stage

Thought modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism - blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm - early modern thought found in these bodily fluids the key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience. Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passges from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

A Historical Phenomenology of (German) Fascism

A Historical Phenomenology of (German) Fascism

History, War and the Transcendence of Modernity

How can the relative inability of social theory to shed light on the horrors of the late twentieth century be reconciled with the fact that both history and social science earlier devoted themselves to arriving at an understanding of war and violence in the modern world? An answer is provided in five steps. First, the disciplinary evolution of the social science disciplines tends to make them oblivious of important parts of their own heritage and opens up a chasm between the social and the historical sciences. Second, the contribution of military experiences to the formation of the policy orientation of modern social sciences renders them less rather than more capable of reflecting upon war as a societal and historical phenomenon. Third, rational choice theory and historical sociology are relatively unable to arrive at an understanding of the cultural constitution of modernity and share a naturalistic conception of war and violence. Fourth, at least five features of war in the late twentieth century transcend the experiences of modernity. Fifth, in order to grasp these features conceptually, social theory has to acknowledge different varieties of modernity seriously, to elaborate a historical phenomenology of the experiences of war and violence, and to arrive at an actionbased explanation of wars in their societal and historical context.

Russia's Political Unconscious in the Possessed: Dostoevsky's New Phenomenology of History and Representation

Russia's Political Unconscious in the Possessed: Dostoevsky's New Phenomenology of History and Representation

Questioning Practice: Heidegger, Historicity, and the Hermeneutics of Facticity

We remain of necessity strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we must mistake ourselves, for us the maxim reads to all eternity: "each is furthest from himself,"--with respect to ourselves we are not "knowers" -Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Preface, 1) It is more salutary for thinking to wander into the strange than to establish itself in the understandable. -Attributed to Heraclitus, Fragment 50 For Martin Heidegger, in his lecture courses and occasional pieces of the early 1920's, historical understanding occurs according to an orientation that arises out of the experience of the today in its facticity.1 The articulation of historical understanding awakens the question of the possibility of a historically-situated action-guiding understanding. Understanding, which always occurs from out of a particular place and particular time, is the way and manner humans are in the world. As such, the question of understanding raises the issue of the facticity of understanding. If understanding is historical, in the sense of the double genitive, the question of historicity becomes especially pressing for that being whose today--with its ecstatic sense of past, present, and future--is an issue for it. Historical understanding refers not only to what is being understood (history), for which Heidegger criticized traditional hermeneutics and historiography, but to how it is understood as a way of our own being in a situation and world (historicity). My claim is that because understanding is historical in this double sense, understanding occurs according to an orientation that arises out of the experience of historicity in its facticity.2 The double sense of historicity meant that Heidegger was compelled to reconsider how history was conceived in previous philosophy, especially the phenomenology of Husserl. Phenomenology needs to become not only genetic and generative, but genealogical and hermeneutical. Phenomenology becomes hermeneutical if the concern with genesis can be turned toward the contingency and facticity of origins and their disclosure rather than remaining a concern with the origin of ideal meanings and validity. Phenomenology thus does not become hermeneutical in the sense of revealing the omnipresence of the immanence of meaning but, on the contrary, the practice of phenomenology discloses the "hermeneutical situation" from out of which it occurs. It indicates the hermeneutical situation, in which I always find myself, as far as the potentially irreducible contingency and singularity of this situation is found to be a question for me and places me into question. The moment in which I live can resist and even decenter my understanding of it.3 It is precisely this character of facticity that opens up and reveals my possibilities. My possibilities for action are grounded in the facticity of my existence. Practice follows facticity in its double sense: (1) the facticity of the repetition and habits of everyday life and (2) the facticity that throws this habitual everydayness into question, which opens up possibilities, and allows for choosing and acting otherwise. The young Heidegger had argued that Husserl's attempts to deal with the problems of a genetic and historical phenomenology were inadequate. Heidegger articulated the fractured horizon of intentionality in response to this failure.4 For Heidegger, the rigorous pursuit of phenomenology leads to the "hermeneutics of facticity" that takes the hermeneutical situation as its point of departure. Understanding, considered as a structure of human comportment, is not only the enactment of intentionality in an environment. This enactment is fundamentally temporal and potentially exposes intentionality to its own limits and ruptures. Heidegger undertook the clarification of these limits in his account of "limitexperiences" such as anxiety, boredom, and the anticipation of death. …

The acoustic world of early modern England: attending to the O-factor

We know how a Shakespeare play sounds when performed today, but what would listeners have heard within the wooden O of the Globe Theater in 1599? What sounds would have filled the air in early modern England, and what would these sounds have meant to people in that largely oral culture? In this journey into the sound-worlds of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Bruce R. Smith explores both the physical aspects of human speech (ears, lungs, tongue) and the surrounding environment (buildings, landscape, climate), as well as social and political structures. Drawing on a range of evidence, he crafts a historical phenomenology of sound, from reconstructions of the soundscapes of city, country, and court to accounts of the acoustic properties of the Globe and Blackfriars theatres and how scripts designed for the two spaces exploited sound very differently.

"Song of ourselves": a quantitative history of American autobiographies.

This article highlights the major descriptive findings of an exploratory, quantitative study of American autobiographies published before 1945. Of particular importance for gerontology, age-cohort distributions of autobiographers are graphed, demonstrating that the genre itself has been created predominantly by men and women aged 55 and over. This study suggests that these writers offer scholars a virtually untapped resource for the historical phenomenology of aging.

Approaching hysteria: disease and its interpretations

Few diseases have exercised the Western imagination as chronically as hysteria - from the wandering womb of ancient Greek medicine, to the demonically possessed witch of the Renaissance; from the vaporous salon women of Enlightenment Paris, through to the celebrated patients of Sigmund Freud, with their extravagant, erotically charged symptoms. In this book, the author surveys the range of past and present readings of hysteria by intellectual historians; historians of science and medicine; scholars in gender studies, art history, and literature; and psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and neurologists. In so doing, he explores numerous questions raised by this ever-growing body of literature: why, in recent years, has the history of hysterical disorders carried such resonance for commentators in the sciences and humanities? What can we learn from the textual traditions of hysteria about writing the history of disease in general? What is the broader cultural meaning of the new hysteria studies? In the second half of the book, Micale discusses the many historical cultures of hysteria. He reconstructs the past usages of the hysteria concept as a powerful, descriptive trope in various non-medical domains, including poetry, fiction, theatre, social thought, political criticism, and the arts. His book is an attempt to write the historical phenomenology of disease in an age preoccupied with health, and a prescriptive remedy for writing histories of disease in the future.

God, nature and the end of history

Alexandre Kojtve argued, in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, that Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousness implied that history has an achievable tefos. The development of the philosophical understanding of the truth of consciousness culminates in the philosopher’s awareness of consciousness as the ground of the unity of thought and being. Hegel tried to solve the Cartesian problem of how thought and extension are commensurate by a historical phenomenology of consciousness. The realisation in philosophy of the unity of thought and being thus marks an end to the historical process of philosophical enlightenment. This also marks the end of history beyond which, “there will never more be anything new on earth.“’ As philosophy is one’s age grasped in thought, the achievement of the telos of philosophy is also the achievement of the telos of politics. Just as Hegel’s Encyclopedia ended the historical development of philosophy, so the Prussian state as described in Philosophy of Right terminated political evolution. The Idea was instantiated theoretically and practically in its most logically adequate form. The contradictions. which had impelled history forward had all been overcome, and, therefore, the story had come to its end.2 The metaphor for post-historical society will not be the struggle for recognition between master and slave, but, who knows what?j Kojeve has opened up to critics of modernity a fruitful avenue of thought. The absence of limit, of context and balance in modernity, its curious mixture of vanity and despair, are rooted in the horizonless freedom that comes from absolute self-mastery. Having achieved “Absolute Knowledge” and the fully rational state, we are left with the pure will as the well-spring of action. The irony in Hegel’s attempt to see history as the story of the achievement of absolute knowledge is that Reason, which unfolds historically and which revolves the dialectical tension between the freedom of the subjective will and the logical order, is replaced in the end by arbitrariness. We have become like gods.4 God and nature, which had been the positive and negative poles marking the boundary and context of human action, have been absorbed into the allencompassing presence of Absolute Spirit. Herbert Marcuse saw in the idea of the achievement of the telos of history, a collapse of the critical dimension. The post-historical world lies beyond criticism. In a fully rational state the Aristotelian distinction between the good citizen and the good man is overcome. Aristotle argued that a critical understanding of the political order required that citizenship and humanity not be equated. Politics is meaningful if enfolded into a higher natural and divine order. Criticising the juxtaposition of appearance and reality that was philosophy’s highest task,

The pilgrimage of Joel Andrews: aging in the autobiography of a Yankee farmer.

Autobiographical writing offers a vast and virtually untapped resource for the historical phenomenology of aging. This essay interprets the autobiography of Joel Andrews-an aging Yankee farmer whose life spanned the period from the American Revolution to the end of the Civil War. We attempt to recreate the poignance and integrity of this ordinary man's struggle with aging and death within the context of his own historical circumstances and religious beliefs. In particular, the essay argues that Andrews' autobiography both reflects and helps accomplish his central task in old age: the religiously sanctioned transition from physical to spiritual man. Andrews' experience provides an interesting contrast to contemporary ideas about health and vitality in old age.

The Category of Dualism in the Historical Phenomenology of Religion

No abstract available

The “Later” Thought of Merleau-Ponty

In about 1958, Merleau-Ponty told Sartre that he would write a book on nature. The news does not seem to have surprised Sartre, but one wonders why it didn't. After all, Merleau-Ponty had already had his say on this issue: both The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, his first two books and certainly his best known efforts, make up a single prolonged study of the relationship of consciousness and nature. It concludes to that philosophical primacy of the union of these in perception which has been Merleau-Ponty's “trademark” ever since. It was completed by 1945. Shortly afterward, he promised that he would describe the passage from perception to explicit, conceptualized knowledge in a book which he would call l'Origine de la Vérité. Meanwhile, he turned from the relations of consciousness with nature to those of consciousness with consciousness and worked at a phenomenology of history (in the period, roughly, from 1945 to 1955), a phenomenology of language (from 1950 to 1953), and even a phenomenology of philosophy (from 1953 to 1956).