Pure Experience Research Articles

Nishida Kitarō’s Philosophy of Body

In this paper, I shall discuss Nishida’s 西田 philosophy of body from the aspects of acting intuition, rhythm, and situatedness. Pure experience used to be the starting point of Nishida’s early philosophy. In his later philosophy, however, the keyword in Nishida’s philosophy is no longer “experience” but “acting.” It is neither “I think therefore I am” nor “I will therefore I am,” but “I act therefore I am.” As the organ of acting intuition, body is one of the most important philosophical concepts in Nishida’s later philosophy. I shall interpret the philosophy of acting intuition as a phenomenology of rhythm. Also, I shall argue that acting intuition can be understood as a situated action. For Nishida, our body is historical: I am not a knowing body, but an acting body.

The Kyoto School: An Introduction by Robert E. Carter (review)

Reviewed by: The Kyoto School: An Introduction by Robert E. Carter Richard F. Calichman (bio) The Kyoto School: An Introduction. By Robert E. Carter. State University of New York Press, Albany, 2013. xxii, 236 pages. $75.00, cloth; $24.95, paper. In his foreword to this volume, Thomas P. Kasulis describes The Kyoto School: An Introduction as a nyūmon, an introduction that can be understood [End Page 500] in its literal meaning as an “entry gate.” “Every great Japanese institution has a nyūmon,” Kasulis writes, citing the example of entrances to Zen Buddhist temples, Shintō shrines, and educational sites such as the University of Tokyo (pp. x–xi). To this we can add the more general point that gates do not simply demarcate the space of an entity that has already appeared or presented itself as such; on the contrary, gates help determine the entity in its presentation, invariably transforming it in the course of its appearing and reappearing in the world. By its very nature, in other words, the introduction alters what it introduces. Although introductions are generally regarded as a medium through which an object can be more or less transparently represented, the fact is that this medium subjectively intervenes in the establishment of its object. It is important to keep this point in mind, as there is nothing inherently “Japanese” about Kyoto School philosophy. Both Kasulis and the book’s author, Robert Carter, wish to determine the Kyoto School in this manner, as indeed did many of the Kyoto School thinkers themselves, and this desire is itself of interest given the fact that philosophical discourse typically aims to transcend the relativism of cultural particularity and arrive at something like universal truth. In studies of “Western” philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Henri Bergson, for example, one rarely sees attempts to so intimately link the thought of these philosophers to the specific national cultures of Germany and France, respectively. In the discourse on the Kyoto School, however, one encounters a powerful desire to determine this philosophy as properly Japanese, a product of Eastern culture in its distinction from the West. Rather than question or challenge this desire, Carter unfortunately replicates it. Much could be said about the culturalism that governs such East-West discourse, and how Kyoto School philosophy, which is otherwise sharply critical of such dichotomies, nevertheless participated in reinforcing these cultural binaries. Much too could be said about the whole-part relation that ideologically determines individuals as members, or parts, of national cultural totalities, from which one could then inquire into the possibility of conceiving of forms of resistance to this framework. These questions do not exist outside of philosophy; they are in no way extraneous or incidental to philosophical discourse. Carter, however, regards such issues as strictly tangential to his project of introducing Kyoto School philosophy. He regards this philosophy as, in some sense, an explicit conceptual articulation of a mindset that inheres among the Japanese people and can be seen in latent or inchoate form among certain “traditional” Japanese cultural practices. Before exploring this point, however, let us provide a general overview of the four primary chapters, each devoted to a major Kyoto School philosopher: Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990), and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960). These chapters are clearly laid out and informative in their presentation of the ideas of these [End Page 501] thinkers. The Nishida chapter focuses mainly on his seminal 1911 work, Zen no kenkyū (An inquiry into the good). As Carter explains, Nishida attempted in this text to elaborate a notion of “pure experience” through dialogue with thinkers such as Bergson and William James. This experience represents a primal unity that emerges prior to the distinction between subject and object. For Nishida, the structural unity that governs man in his faculties of thinking and willing is identical to the structural unity that underlies the world of objects. In this way, experience must be conceived as more originary than the individual subject, who can only appear on the basis of that experience. Carter, who has written extensively on Nishida elsewhere, reveals a keen understanding of the philosopher’s thought. Yet it must...

Parsing the Topos and Dusting the Mirror: A Radical Internalization of “Basho-Topos”

In order to clarify Nishida’s notion of topos ( basho ), I trace its formation, starting with the notion of “pure experience,” of which he says: “To experience is to know the thing as it is.” By taking the act of “to know” as the thread that connects the ideas of pure experience and topos, I examine his early writings leading up to 1929, going beyond 1926, when Nishida’s essay “ Basho ” was published. Over against the commonly held “objectified” view of the topos as a “location” or “field” in which the individual exists, a radically ontological reading of this notion emerges, requiring us to shift the vantage point from which we approach it. I conclude that Nishida introduced into his philosophical system a locative dimension as an ontological feature, and we, conscious beings, exist in this world “topologically” ( bashoteki ). The topos refers to the very logico-ontological mode of our being.

O PRAGMATISMO CLÁSSICO AMERICANO E A FILOSOFIA DA DIFERENÇA: QUESTÕES PARA A EDUCAÇÃO

It develops the ideas of classic american pragmatists like William James and John Dewey in its main concepts of radical empiricism, experience, education and pure experience; such ideas are put together with the philosophical concepts thought by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to demonstrate the stratigraphic plan of philosophy and its importance to the field of education.

The Sacrament of Language

The Sacrament of Language

Demystifying Experience

從空背空。 To pursue emptiness is to lose emptiness.2 Martin Heidegger's thinking of being and Chan (禪; Zen in Japanese) Buddhism have been portrayed as revealing “pure experience” through a confrontati...

Ecological Imagination in Moral Education, East and West

Relational philosophies developed in classical American pragmatism and Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy suggest aims for greater responsiveness in moral education. To better guide education, we need to know how perception becomes relevant to our deliberations. Our deliberations enlist imagination of a specifically sort when imaginative structures we use to understand ecosystemic relationships shape our mental simulations and rehearsals. Enriched through cross-cultural dialogue, a finely aware imagination can make deliberations of coming generation more trustworthy.Moral education for 21st century must better enable youths to intelligently negotiate complex systems, from economic systems to ecosystems, in private choices and public policies. Educational institutions must do a better job helping youths to see beyond simple relations of consumers to commodities if we are to respond to a global economic milieu in which affluence sanctifies innocence of consumers - an innocence purchased by ignorance of social, environmental, and inter-species hazards posed by our business as usual behaviors. Contemporary moral perception requires supplementation and expansion beyond speck of self-interest around which most daily consumer concerns orbit.In order to clarify and develop aims for moral education that are relevant to global effects of our choices and policies, we need sustained, crosscultural philosophical dialogue that taps intellectual resources for reinvesting our social and natural interconnections while avoiding moralistic or authoritarian instruction that chokes growth. East Asian and American philosophical traditions, despite paucity of environmental virtues in current majority cultures of either, can help us to better perceive relational networks in which our finite lives are embedded. In first section of this paper explore relational thinking in classical American pragmatism and Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy to help develop, in second section, a concept of ecological imagination. In final section draw from foregoing to clarify appropriate aims for contemporary moral education if it is to contribute to greater responsiveness.1. Relational Imagination, East and WestAcknowledging upfront that comparative projects can tend toward selfcentered, monological, and appropriative modes of ... historical thinking,1 it will nonetheless be helpful to identify several general affinities between relational thinking of American pragmatism and many East Asian traditions, inasmuch as these affinities suggest aims for ecologically responsible moral education. To keep scope manageable, draw primarily on wisdom distilled from Kyoto School.Kyoto University is where modern Japanese philosophy began with Nishida Kitaro's (1870-1945) work reconstructing tools and concepts of western philosophy, such as idea of pre-conceptual pure experience in James, to contribute an eastern standpoint to western philosophy. Nishida built philosophy department at Kyoto University, secured an appointment for Tanabe Hajime, launched career of Watsuji Tetsuro, and attracted Nishitani Keiji among other students, continuing what became known as Kyoto School (Kyoto-gaku-ha) tradition.The Kyoto School philosophers were among first to bring a distinctively East Asian perspective to enlarging and challenging philosophical tradition that began in ancient Greece.4 They are part of an ongoing global philosophical dialogue that extends - or should extend - well beyond confines of Asian Studies or Japanese Studies. When say 'philosophy,' Nishitani wrote, I first of all mean Western philosophy, since this is most influential one. ... To think [the Buddhist] standpoint by way of philosophy is my basic concern.5A. The American pragmatist tradition joins many East Asian traditions in avoiding fallacies of reification that privilege agents over situations, static forms over processes, substantive over transitive - what James dubbed psychologist's fallacy, Dewey recognized as the philosophical (LW 1 : 27-29), and Whitehead labeled fallacy of misplaced concreteness. …

Re-Examining Sartre’s Reading of The Myth Of Sisyphus

One of the main obstacles in approaching the work of Albert Camus nowadays is the prevalent notion that his fictional works are somehow an illustration of a philosophy contained in his nonfiction writings. This is an idea which may be traced back to 1 942, to an influential review written of his debut novel, Stranger. review was written by Jean-Paul Sartre soon after completing Being and Nothingness, and while awaiting its publication. Recently, David Carroll has stated: existentialist interpretation Stranger had an important influence on readers of the novel and the essay [The Myth of Sisyphus] for decades. only began to be abandoned, although rarely if ever directly questioned, long after Algerian independence, with the growth postcolonial cultural criticism in the last few decades.1 purpose of this essay is to directly question how Sartre constructed his interpretation of Camus's novel, and to show that the structure of this initial review has not been so easily abandoned. In order to appreciate the prevalence Sartre's interpretative strategy over the reception of Camus's early work, it will be necessary to briefly survey some of the more recent scholarship, and some of the more prominent scholarship from the past. Richard Kamber, for example, bypasses almost all of the text of Stranger in his analysis of it, and goes straight to the final pages, where Meursault converses with the priest: meaning of this passage is critical for a philosophical critique of Stranger, since it is the only place in the novel where Meursault, the speaker and main character, attempts to give a philosophical explanation for his beliefs about the human condition. Yet the explanation presented in this passage seems incomplete in several respects. Let us examine what is missing in this formulation and try to determine how it should or could be completed.2 This is how Kamber completes the novel: The text of Stranger suggests these questions, but it does not provide the answers, he states: Camus's reflections on the importance of life itself, one must turn to Myth of Sisyphus3 Likewise, John Foley states: although we do not of course read them as a single text, if we are to read Outsider as a novel of ideas, then the severe limits imposed on the meaning of the absurd in Myth of Sisyphus need to be taken into account. For Camus, Meursault is the absurd hero par excellence4. novel is thereby circumscribed by the perceived philosophical concerns of the essay: Camus, Meursault represents the modern Sisyphus, the authentic man in a world bereft of transcendent meaning.5 work of Robert C. Solomon is a much more extreme case. He seems to bypass both the novel and the essay and goes straight to imposing a narrowly Sartrean philosophy onto Camus's work: To state my interpretation baldly, Meursault is a philosophically fantastic character who, for the first part of the novel, is an ideal Sartrean pre-reflective consciousness, pure experience without reflection. . . . But then, in the second part of the novel . . . [the] threat of imminent finally forces him into a Heideggerian celebration of the privilege of death and the happy death, which is a constant theme in Camus's novels.6 is from this position that Solomon can then comfortably trace the relationship between novel and essay: It is the movement from pure unreflective experience to reflection and philosophy. is the second part of the book [The Stranger] that carries us into the realm of Myth of Sisyphus.1 David Sherman, drawing heavily from Solomon (a former teacher, then colleague), is likewise determined to contain Camus with certain categories of philosophy, existentialism in particular. As Sherman states: Although Myth of Sisyphus was published shortly after Stranger, its exposition of the Absurd sets the philosophical stage for virtually all that follows. …

The Confucian Roots of zen no kenkyū: Nishida's Debt to Wang Yang-Ming in the Search for a Philosophy of Praxis

This essay takes as its focus Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and his seminal first text, An Inquiry into the Good (or in Japanese zen no kenkyū). Until now scholarship has taken for granted the predominantly Buddhist orientation of this text, centered around an analysis of the central concept of ‘pure experience’ (junsui keiken) as something Nishdia extrapolates from his early experience of Zen meditation. However, in this paper I will present an alternative and more accurate account of the origins of this important work, a text often seen as marking the beginning of Modern Japanese philosophy. I will show that while Buddhism is an important part of Nishida's early intellectual development, there is ample biographical and textual evidence to suggest that zen no kenkyū is at its core a text which attempts to solve key ethical problems via a modern interpretation of concepts drawn from the Confucian tradition. This analysis thus places the concept of ‘Conduct’ (koi), rather than ‘pure experience’, at the center of the text, suggesting that ethics, rather than metaphysics, is the core theme of the book.

James and Whitehead

This paper contributes to a growing body of philosophical and psychological work that draws parallels between the writings of William James and Alfred North Whitehead1.1 In Part One I introduce Whitehead’s distinction between assemblage and systematization (section 1) and suggest that Whitehead’s philosophy was in part a systematization of James’ psychological and philosophical assemblage (section 2). The systematization is based on a rethinking of the entity/function contrast (section 3) by way of Whitehead’s concept of the actual entity/occasion (section 4). This permits a process- oriented ontological extension and James’ notion of pure experience (sections 5 & 6), which yields a deepened version of radical empiricism (section 7). The four sections of Part Two build a more specific argument that James’ often implicit distinctions between energetic, perceptual, conceptual and discursive modes of experience can be systematized by way of Whitehead’s concepts of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy and symbolic reference. Following the suggestion of Magritte’s famous Ceci n’est pas une Pipe artwork, this yields an analysis of the sum of human experience into four progressively integrated factors: power, image, proposition and enunciation.

Mystical Experience Among Tibetan Buddhists: The Common Core Thesis Revisited

In the study of mysticism the debate has centered on whether a universal experiential core exists regardless of religious interpretation. The current investigation combines Jamesian empiricist and social constructivist perspectives to argue that stable experiential facets load variously on factors to construct local interpretations. Local interpretations reflect a family resemblance—a mystical common core experienced across cultures. Results of confirmatory factor analyses, based on data from 240 Tibetan Buddhist adults, suggest statistical model fit and superiority for the three-factor model compared to the unidimensional model. Pure experience can be distinguished explicitly from its context-specific hermeneutical construal.

Mystics. By WILLIAM HARMLESS, SJ.

In this excellent and very readable introduction to the mystics, the author has adopted a case-study approach to the subject instead of the usual historical or systematic approaches (though he does draw on these to some extent). His approach is reminiscent of the one adopted by William James in his famous Varieties of Religious Experience, though it is crucially and deliberately different. For the underlying argument of the author is that James’s pared down psychological approach is only an element of the truth of mysticism. The psychological approach, otherwise known as the core experience approach, is essentially the view that, if you strip away the trappings of language, historical and social context, and religious ritual, tradition, and doctrine, then you come to something which is pure experience. Bernard of Clairvaux, who gave us the language of mystical marriage, introduced the category of experience into the vocabulary of the Western mystical tradition. But, as Professor Harmless points out, Bernard did not believe we arrived at truth by pure experience but by understanding the Bible experientially. It is clear from the author’s exploration of Sufism and Zen Buddhism that the mystical texts of those traditions are as steeped in the language of those traditions as Western mystical texts are steeped in the Bible. The individualistic, timeless approach pioneered by James has become unpopular with scholars of mysticism, and Harmless, in plain and simple language, has convincingly shown us its inadequacies, striving successfully to give us a more balanced picture. Although he has adopted a case-study approach, unlike James he has taken care to situate each mystic in his or her life and times, rather than to emphasize peak religious experiences. As he says, such experiences do not occur only to an elite and in isolation but, if they occur at all, it is within the day-to-day prayer life and spiritual practices of ordinary prayerful people and is part of their process of growth.

Philosophie du néant et théologie du processus

I. The Development of Nishida’s Philosophy of Nothingness reviewed from the Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in Japanese Spirituality(1) Psychology of Nothingness. Pure Experience and Religion (2) Self-Awareness of Nothingness. Intuition and Reflection in the Self-Awareness (3) Nothingness as the Ultimate Universal. Phenomenology of the Self-Awakening in the Field of Nothingness (4) Inter-Subjectivity of Nothingness. The I-Thou Relation and the “Absolute Other” in the Field of Nothingness (5) Creativity of Nothingness. The Historical World as the Dialectical Universal (6) The Self-Emptying of the Absolute. The Structure of Pan-en-theism and the Unity of Opposites in Nishida’s PhilosophyII. Haya-Theology as a Theology of Creativity (1) The Criticism of Onto-Theology from the Biblical Perspective (2) Haya-Theology as a Biblical Theology contained in God’s Self-Revelation to Moses as Promise of Freedom (3) Haya-Theology as a Theology of Creativity characterized as follows: (i) Pan-en-theism (ii) Sur-relativism (self-transcendent relativism / self-trans-descending absolutism) (iii) Sur-naturalism (self-transcendent naturalism/self-trans-descending supernaturalism)

Boxcars and Books

gently vetoed my proposed revision to the poem's final lines: as if were the one brief, brutal, / impersonal thing in the world. No, she said when I mentioned that I wanted to change pleasure to desire. Desire, she explained, implies intentionality, while plea sure connotes pure experience. Taste of Cherry is instinctual and subversive. You have to own that, she said emphatically. How right she was and still is!

Philosophy of Nothingness and Process Theology

AbstractThis paper discusses the two representative philosophers of the Kyoto School, Kitaro Nishida and Hajime Tanabe from the perspective of process theology and the Buddhist-Christian dialogue in Japan.The first chapter explicates Nishida’s concept of “pure experience” in comparison with William James’ radical empiricism and with Kant’s dualism of sense and reason. Pure experience in Nishida’s sense is neither a passive reception of objective sense-data given before subjective mental operations, nor the raw material of experience which must be given “form” by experiencing subject. It is nothing but metaphysically ultimate activity from which both the experiencing subject and the whole range of the experienced objects from sense-perception to intellectual intuition emerge as its self-unfolding.The second and third chapters discuss the two key concepts of process theology, “concrescence” and “the extensive continuum” with a special reference to the Mahayana Buddhist concept of “emptiness (sunyata)” and “dependent arising (pratityasamutpada)”. Nishida’s tripartite concept of topos, i.e. a topos of relative being, a topos of relative nothingness, and the topos of absolute nothingness will be applied to process theology in order to explicate the relation of two ultimates in Whitehead’s metaphysics, i.e. the relation of God as the religious ultimate to creativity as the metaphysical ultimate.The fourth and fifth chapters discuss Hajime Tanabe as a critical successor of Nishida’s philosophy of Nothingness. Tanabe is more akin to Whitehead than to Nishida in that Tanabe reformulates Nishida’s concept of Nothingness from the temporal perspective of a finite human existence related essentially to “species” or “society” in the historical world. Tanabe transforms the unity of contradictories in the logic of topos into the contrasted opposites in the historical process of becoming, which involves novelty and discontinuous leaps at points of historical crisis. For him history has become “the overall Koan” in which the metaphysical topology of static being is to be superseded by the innovative principle of nothingness in the historical world.

Covert spatial attention in search for the location of a color-afterimage patch speeds up its decay from awareness: Introducing a method useful for the study of neural correlates of visual awareness

Previous research has reported that attention to color afterimages speeds up their decay. However, the inducing stimuli in these studies have been overlapping, thereby implying that they involved overlapping receptive fields of the responsible neurons. As a result it is difficult to interpret the effect of focusing attention on a phenomenally projected target-afterimage. Here, we present a method free from these shortcomings. In searching for a target-afterimage patch among spatially separate alternatives the target fades from awareness before its competitors. This offers a good means to study neural correlates of visual awareness unconfounded with attention and enabling a temporally extended pure phenomenal experience free from simultaneous inflow of sensory transients.

Die Bedeutung der Grade in Bönninghausens Therapeutischem Taschenbuch

The hitherto accepted thesis that the higher, so-called characteristic grades in Boenninghausen's THERAPEUTIC POCKET BOOK represent clinically verified proving symptoms, is to be revised. A larger part of these originates from the pure clinical experience of Boenninghausen's.

Nishida and Western Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: Nishida and Western Philosophy Amos Yong Nishida and Western Philosophy. By Robert Wilkinson. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. vii + 175 pp. Robert Wilkinson is a comparative philosopher who teaches at Open University in Edinburgh and has worked for years in the areas of comparative philosophy of mind and comparative aesthetics. This book should be read as part of a larger discussion of the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), which began with Keiji Nishitani (Nishida Kitarō, trans. S. Yamamoto and J. W. Heisig, University of California Press, 1991) and continues with Robert E. Carter (The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro, Paragon House, 1997) and Robert J.Wargo (The Logic of Nothingness: A Study of Nishida Kitarō, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), among others. Going beyond his predecessors, however—even though it is unfortunate that Wilkinson does not interact much with them explicitly—Nishida and Western Philosophy prosecutes a clear even if perhaps controversial thesis: that in the end, Nishida’s philosophy of self-contradictory identity was, as a natural outgrowth of his Buddhist and Zen experience of satori (awakening), fundamentally incommensurable with the philosophy of identity that has characterized the major trajectory of the Western philosophical tradition. There are four chapters to the book (besides the introduction and then the summary and conclusions). The first focuses on Nishida’s starting point, the Zen Buddhist experience of enlightenment regarding the ultimate emptiness (mu), which albeit a difficult term to translate can be understood at least in part as referring to the nonduality, or even the interrelatedness, of all reality. Nishida’s work can be seen as a lifelong quest to formalize this experiential insight systematically in dialogue with the Western philosophical tradition. In a sense, this can be understood as a spirituality in search of a metaphysic, and given the emergence of Japan on the world stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that up-and-coming Japanese philosophers like Nishida sought to legitimate their own insights in the Western idiom. But precisely for the same reason, however, Nishida rarely appealed to Asian sources, even within the Buddhist tradition, especially in his earlier work. Chapter 2 explicates Nishida’s early philosophy of pure experience, particularly as summarized in his Inquiry into the Good (1911; English translation: Yale University Press, 1990). The major dialogue partner at this point was William James and his notion of radical empiricism, which provided Nishida with Western conceptual resources to think through the primordial base from out of which conscious experience emerged. Thus did pure experience point to the nondual dimension of consciousness before the split between subject and object. Nishida never repudiated his Jamesian connection, although his ongoing work pushed him further and deeper into the metaphysical and ontological dimensions of consciousness that eventually left behind James’s more psychologically driven formulations. Next Wilkinson turns to Nishida’s second major book, Intuition and Reflection in [End Page 231] Self-Consciousness (1917; English translation: State University of New York Press, 1987), and focuses primarily on the Japanese philosopher’s interactions with the Neo-Kantian school of philosophy, Fichte, and Bergson. Each of these provided specific resources for this stage of Nishida’s philosophical project. The Neo-Kantians helped him to think about how the noumena-phenomena and fact-value distinctions contrasted with his own philosophical intuitions regarding their primordial unity in historicity. Fichte enabled the forging of a philosophy of action-consciousness, which promised to go beyond the subject-object distinction, even if in the end (for Nishida), the Fichtean ego remained “trapped” within the logic of identity rather than becoming “delivered” by or within the Zen logic of no-thingness. Bergson, meanwhile, was attractive precisely because of his dynamic (rather than static) philosophy of elan vital or conscious becoming even if Nishida was already discerning at this time that the Bergsonian elan both presumed an ontological togetherness that succumbed to the Western logic of identity on the one hand, and was not sufficiently attentive to the contrary of becoming—death, or the lapsing back into no-thingness—which was a prominent feature of historical reality on the other hand. Yet these Western interlocutors...

Hyper‐transcendentalism and Intentionality: On the Specificity of the ‘Transcendental’ in Material Phenomenology

This article seeks to grasp the meaning of Michel Henry’s use of the term ‘transcendental’ to understand its specific nature as pure experience that owes nothing to the constituted or the a posteriori. It then considers the methodological consequences and difficulties resulting from such a conception of the transcendental. According to my hypothesis, in order to maintain the ‘major division’ between the empirical and the transcendental, material phenomenology is caught in a form of double bind. One cannot say much about the transcendental without risking contamination by the empirical. As far as the constituted is concerned, it is certainly possible to refer to it, but actually there is nothing to say. This paper tests this interpretative hypothesis against a specific example, namely, the phenomenological description of feeling offered by Henry. The analysis concludes by considering whether material phenomenology does not lapse into what Rudolf Bernet calls a form of ‘hyper‐transcendentalism’ in the sense that the totality of empirical reality ends by being ‘transcendentalized’. No basis can be provided for intentionality, as Henry sometimes claims: it becomes a superfluous concept.

Mega Event = Mega Impact? Travelling Fans' Experience and Perceptions of the 2006 FIFA World Cup Host Nation

Mega sports events provide organisers with a unique opportunity to modify the international image of the host country. The article tracks and analyses the destination image change of travelling New Zealand football fans as a result of having attended the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany. The event itself, rather than team support or destination attractiveness was the main motivation to travel. The article follows a longitudinal approach into the subject, methodologically distinct and advanced from previous studies due to its ‘pre-then-post’ approach. Findings from the surveys and interviews show a significant improvement of the host country's image as a result of respondents' direct experience. In particular, respondents thought of Germany as a less expensive, more friendly and multi-cultural place. Insights into the character and dimensions of this change are provided, reflecting on ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ factors of destination image. The analysis of results defines which aspects of sports supporters' perceptions go beyond the pure sports experience. This offers avenues for future research into the link between mega sports events, travelling fans' host country experience and tourism destination promotion.