Phenomenological Reading Research Articles

Xiong Shili’s Phenomenological Approach to the Book of Changes

In the 1932 version of his New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness, Xiong Shili interprets the classical Chinese Book of Changes as an illustration of the basic configurations of consciousness. His interpretation relies on concepts developed by Yogācāra Buddhism, which he criticizes, adapts, and translates into language that can then be applied to the Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions. As a result, Xiong’s interpretation of the Book of Changes bears comparison with more recent phenomenological readings of both Yogācāra Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism.

Knowledges “In the Land”? A Process Phenomenological Reading of Deborah Bird Rose’s “Exploring an Aboriginal Land Ethic”

Abstract Inspired by a (process) phenomenological reading of Deborah Bird Rose’s 1988 article “Exploring an Aboriginal Land Ethic,” and drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s claim that knowledge is “in the hands,” this paper explores the intersection of Merleau-Ponty’s embodied, process phenomenology and Indigenous Australian place-based ontologies. Rather than the moral demands or consequences of adopting an “Aboriginal land ethic,” the present paper is concerned with the ontological and epistemological – or, broadly speaking, the phenomenological – underpinnings of such a land ethic. Contra Rose’s claim that, in the Western tradition, we “have very little idea of what a non-human-centred cosmos looks like and how it can be thought to work,” it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental thought provides us with a viable pathway towards a non-human-centred phenomenological ontology that, somewhat paradoxically, is nevertheless grounded in the lived body. It is suggested that such an approach is compatible with, and complimentary to, the traditional Indigenous Australian ways of being and knowing outlined by Rose.

Right Here and Out There: A Phenomenological Interpretation of ajjhattaṃṃ and bahiddhā in the Context of Mindfulness of the Body

According to the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, mindfulness of the body involves seeing the body in a threefold way: ajjhattaṃ, bahiddhā and ajjhattabahiddhā. This paper attempts to show how an investigation of bodily perception, following the approach adopted by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, can serve as the basis for a philosophically grounded understanding of the Pāli words ajjhattaṃ and bahiddhā. The interpretation that emerges is the distinction between ‘right here’ and ‘out there’: two mutually dependent, internally related domains that are experienced as what Merleau-Ponty (1968) called the ‘chiasm’ or the ‘intertwining’. This is different from the standard interpretations found in the Abhidhamma, the Pāli commentaries, the Visuddhimagga and the instructions of most contemporary meditation teachers. It is hoped that the interpretation offered here can give some exposure to a movement within Theravāda Buddhism, initiated by Ñāṇavīra Thera but slowly gaining traction, characterised by a phenomenological reading of the Pāli suttas.

Comments on the book of Tereza Matějčková Gibt es eine Welt in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes? / “Is there a world in Hegelʼs Phenomenology of Spirit?”, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2018

Tereza Matějčková’s book presents a highly interesting phenomenological reading of Hegel’s early masterpiece. The result is a proposal to take the title seriously – such that we can see the book as the earliest introduction into the methods and topics of philosophical phenomenology, despite the fact that Husserl himself, in contrast to Heidegger, did not seem to see the narrow relation. I especially value Tereza Matějčkováʼs very deep understanding of the dialectical humour and irony of Hegel’s writings. However, I understand the Phenomenology of Spirit in a somehow more radical way as a most general ‘logicֹ’ of self-consciousness. It shows how referring to myself is referring to the world and vice versa, despite the fact that the word ‘world’ does not play a prominent role in Hegelʼs text. Some disagreements result over Hegelʼs wide use of metaphors and analogies in his structural analysis of personal self-relations, for example in his reconstruction and critique of the age-old (in fact Platonic) image of a fight between a thinking soul as master and a system of immediate bodily desires as slave. We cannot get rid of inclinations and appetites, and we cannot retreat, as the Stoics had thought, into pure thinking. In other words, there is no fight ‘for recognition’ between different individuals in Hegelʼs book, but in the end an answer to a classical theodicy saying that the world, as it is, is the best one we have because there is only one world.

CONCEPTE FUNDAMENTALE PENTRU O FENOMENOLOGIE A TRANSFORMĂRII EXPERIENȚEI

In this paper, I aim to phenomenologically analyze the transformation of experience, which can be epitomized both by religious conversion and phenomenological reduction. In so doing, I propose a definite set of concepts such as: self-dislodgement and relodgement (dislocare-relocare), open and closed experience, consolidation of experience, hierarchy of relevance and others. I show the clarifying potential of this terminology by putting it at work in a phenomenological reading of some excerpts from Augustine’s Confessions. Moreover, I argue that this conceptuality is deeply rooted both in the medieval tradition of self-understanding of the believer—such as Hildegard of Bingen—and in the Romanian phenomenological tradition, exemplified by Alexandru Dragomir.

HUSSERL, AJDUKIEWICZ, AND BLAUSTEIN ON MEANING

The aim of this article is to investigate the reception of Husserl’s theory of meaning by Ajdukiewicz and Blaustein, two members of the analytically-oriented Lvov-Warsaw School, who, in different ways, were attracted to and confronted with Husserl’s phenomenology. The discussed hypothesis is that Ajdukiewicz’s interpretation of Logical Investigations, and his original theory of meaning influenced both Blaustein’s critical reading of Husserl’s theory of intentionality and his account of meaning-intention. After outlining the central elements of “First Logical Investigation” the paper shows how it is interpreted by Ajdukiewicz in his Lvov lectures on logic and in his directival theory of meaning. What emerges is a psychological-descriptive interpretation of Husserl’s concept of meaning, and a reconsideration of his theory of intentionality within the inferential structure of beliefs in premises that motivates a person who speaks a language to believe in conclusions of a certain form. This leads Ajdukiewicz to his own original conventionalist account of meaning which is based on the identification of three main directives of meaning that represent the matrix of a given language, i.e., the grid in which each meaning finds its place. These elements allow one to demonstrate how Ajdukiewicz’s interpretation resonates in Blaustein’s critique of Husserl in his early writings, where, in addition to a psychological-descriptive reading of phenomenology we also find a conventionalist conception of meaning acts and signitive presentations. According to Blaustein, a sign can represent an object only through the conventions arising from the directives of meaning that belong to a given natural language.

Kairos, The Sire of Beauty

ABSTRACT Despite the common understanding of kairos as a temporal concept, it also harbors a spatial notion that holds particular significance in relation to Greek visual arts. The inquiry into its primary role in the formation of aesthetic beauty requires a phenomenological reading of the Lysippan personification of the concept, as it resonates with its counterparts in the fields of philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. Using Andrew Stewart’s suggestion as a starting point—that the Lysippan Kairos may serve as the artist’s manifesto, consciously constructed in response to the earlier Polykleitan Canon—the evidence for kairos as the sire of beauty is shown to reside not only in its principal role in characterizing the perfect proportion and harmony, but also in its relationship to somatic intuition and sensory understanding, implicating the viewer as a key participant in the process.

Revealing the invisible: A phenomenological reading of N.B. Phuong’s The Absent (1999) and W. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930)

This article conducts a comparative analysis of the concept of invisibility within two literary works: The Absent(Nguoi di vang, in Vietnamese) by N.B. Phuong and As I Lay Dying by W. Faulkner. It employs M. Henry’s phenomenological insights into life and aesthetics as a theoretical framework to delve into the expression and perception of invisibility in these texts. The study demonstrates that invisibility plays a dynamic role in both novels, exploring how it is articulated, revealed, perceived, and comprehended. By immersing characters in states of dying and coma, these narratives facilitate an exploration of the invisible as a perceptual experience. Both authors delve into the realm of invisibility by granting voices to the earth and its inhabitants, simultaneously emphasizing the silences and gaps in human communication. The central objective of this article is to identify common themes and perspectives related to the manifestation of life in these two writers’ works. Both N.B. Phuong and Faulkner conceive life as fundamentally invisible, with art serving as the means to unveil this invisible life.

Giving thickness to the minimal self: coenesthetic depth and the materiality of consciousness

AbstractContemporary phenomenological psychopathology has raised questions concerning selfhood and its possible alterations in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Although the notion of the self is central to several accounts of anomalies, it remains a question how exactly the radically minimal experiential features of selfhood can be altered. Indeed, the risk is to reduce the notion of selfhood so drastically, that it can no longer account for alterations of experience. Here we propose to give thickness to the minimal self. To do this we first discuss Sartre’s phenomenological definition of coenesthesia as the translucent matter of consciousness articulating it with the notion of existential feelings. We then draw on the historical research on coenesthesia to dig deeper in this translucent materiality identified as the element of the body. We show that selfhood, even in its most minimal level, must be conceived of with a specific elemental thickness, corresponding to a phenomenological materiality of embodiment. We argue that a phenomenological reading of coenesthesia as the bodily element of ipseity can shed a new light on the anomalies of self-experience.

Teachers' bodies, (trans)national desires, and the phenomenology of gender

This essay urges transnational feminist scholarship and pedagogy to move beyond gender as a social, discursive construct and conceptualize it instead as lived temporality of the body. Through a phenomenological reading of the lives of three cis-gendered female teachers in future-oriented neoliberal school regimes in India and Turkey, it shows how normative ‘gender’ is the sedimentation of histories of race and nation and past traumas that is reproduced through bodies, while we remain oblivious to those histories. At the same time, bodies also occasionally rupture lived time or normative performances of gender by desiring love, beauty and reminiscing times past. A transnational analysis of gendered embodiment and temporality grounded in specific histories and the similarities between how bodies across nations break away from norms in their desires for love and life, reveal alternate transnational politics and possibilities around gender that center sensuality, unruliness and ambiguity.

The Experience of Affordances in an Intersubjective World

Our paper is concerned with theories of direct perception in ecological psychology that first emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Ecological psychology continues to be influential among philosophers and cognitive scientists today who defend a 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) approach to the scientific study of cognition. Ecological psychologists have experimentally investigated how animals are able to directly perceive their surrounding environment and what it affords to them. We pursue questions about direct perception through a discussion of the ecological psychologist’s concept of affordances. In recent years, psychologists and philosophers have begun to mark out two explanatory roles for the affordance concept. In one role, affordances are cast as belonging to a shared, publicly available environment, and existing independent of the experience of any perceiving and acting animal. In a second role, affordances are described in phenomenological terms, in relation to an experiencing animal that has its own peculiar needs, interests and personal history. Our aim in this paper is to argue for a single phenomenological or experiential understanding of the affordance concept. We make our argument, first of all, based on William James’ concept of pure experience developed in his later, radical empiricist writings. James thought of pure experience as having a field structure that is organized by the selective interest and needs of the perceiver. We will argue however that James did not emphasize sufficiently the social and intersubjective character of the field of experience. Drawing on the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, we will argue that psychological factors like individual needs and attention must be thought of as already confronted with a social reality. On the phenomenological reading of affordances we develop, direct perception of affordances is understood as taking place within an intersubjective world structured by human social and cultural life.

Female Subjectivity and Body Politics in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Zikora

This paper examines the pregnant female body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Zikora. The protagonist's experiences of loneliness, abandonment and struggle during her pregnancy are situated within diverse socio-political relations, including patriarchy, sexuality, immigrant status, romance, transnational background and generation gaps. Drawing on critical insights from body politics, especially Elaine Scarry's concept of conscious body, Michel Foucault's notion of body discipline and Elizabeth Grosz's phenomenological reading of lived bodies, the analysis explores how the protagonist Adichie challenges the traditional understanding of the female body as a mere biological object. The paper argues that through her bodily experiences, the protagonist gains agency to critique and reassess gender relations and stereotypes. The journey of self-discovery and subjectivity emerges as the protagonist's aching body becomes a window to perceive existing relationships and meanings, resulting in a revitalized understanding of her own body and its significance.

Being Without World: A Phenomenological Reading of the Findings on Torture in the Colombian Truth Commission’s Final Report

ABSTRACT This paper explores the theme of torture in the Colombian Truth Commission’s Final Report, focusing on its characterization of torture as a way of annulling a person’s identity. Drawing on Jean Améry’s approach, I argue that torture destroys the victim’s world and explore the further implications of this assertion. I begin by highlighting how the history of torture distorts legal and medical practices, masquerading as a quest for truth while exercising a farce of power, disintegrating the victim’s lived body. By delving into Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh,” I also explain how torture erodes the carnal trust that connects us to the world and enables proper communication. Consequently, torture results in an utter negation of the self and the world. In conclusion, I suggest that torture as understood as the destitution of a person’s world, can serve as a paradigm for comprehending the experiences of violence faced by victims in Colombia.

Nature, Consciousness, and Metaphysics in Merleau-Ponty’s Early Thought

La structure du comportement details consciousness-nature relations by navigating between realist and intellectualist alternatives. A phenomenological reading of form guides its attempt to formulate a view that does not reduce consciousness to matter or perceptual structure to a product of mind. I show that this strategy relies on hitherto overlooked idealist commitments. Forms are perceived objects whose intentional structure is intelligibly organized. Having denied that forms are constituted by mind or emergent from matter, Merleau-Ponty likens form-constitution to an ideal process of intentional self-organization. Despite recognizing that Gestalt psychology develops fruitful models of perceptual self-organization, and adopting the transcendental view that form is significant for consciousness, his revisionary interpretation of form outstrips these accounts’ ontologies of mind and nature, and is better understood in light of a post-Kantian philosophical heritage. These results cast Merleau-Ponty’s relation to the Gestalt, post-Kantian, and phenomenological traditions in new light, challenge naturalizing interpretations of Structure, and motivate a rethinking of the status of metaphysics in his early thought.

Islamophobia and (Wes)toxification: A Hermeneutical and phenomenological reading of John Updike’s TERRORIST

This research takes up the dialectical presentation of Terrorist by John Updike to underscore the actively mediating presence of the reader(s) in treating meaning as an event. Drawing on Rosenblatt’s ‘aesthetic mode’ of reading, this paper argues that the determinate and indeterminate meaning(s) of Terrorist perpetuate Islamophobia, ethnocentrism, and Eurocentrism in the (mis)informed reader. The central character of Terrorist, Ahmad, is systematically indoctrinated by the Imam, Shaikh Rashid, and simultaneously manipulated by the CIA operative, Charlie Chehab, to deliver ‘Hutama’ on the nonbelievers/Americans. The dialectical presentation of Terrorist invites the reader to see the Imam as inciting Ahmad to advance his suicidal mission. At the same time, there is some sort of balancing act at work with the CIA’s active incitement to Ahmad to blow up Lincoln’s Tunnel. While the ‘West’ here is also implicated in violent jehad and the hijacking of Ahmad’s critical orientation, the primary mover is the Muslim prayer leader, and by extension, the place of worship, the mosque, the act of worship itself. So, as informed readers participate in the dialectics of meaning construction, they do so not in isolation, but in the (overbearing) presence of existing views, representations and prismatic constructions of Islam. In this sense the reader is (mis)informed to maintain and support stereotypes of Islam, which Terrorist is superficially questioning.

Phenomenological Considerations of the World of the Obsessive Patient.

Despite significant scientific advances in research on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the psychological and behavioral symptoms of this pathological condition remain hard to understand, until they seem paradoxical. The present work seeks to consider the significance and potential contribution of a phenomenological reading of OCD and how phenomenalism has influenced some cognitive models of this disorder. Transcendental phenomenology is a philosophical approach that attaches primary importance to intuitive experience and considers all phenomena intrinsically associated with the subject's inner world. Thus, the subject's intuition is considered the starting point for understanding their essential experience. This approach has had a profound influence on modern cognitive sciences. Among current cognitive models, post-rationalist cognitivism and cognitive neuropsychological psychotherapy seem most effective in capturing the world experiences of OCD patients. Both apply a phenomenological approach to identify these experiences, which are typically characterized by hyper-reflexivity, at the expense of 'natural evidence.' The models have found that OCD patients experience the world emotionally as a sterile set of rules, and this experience determines their suffering.

Kumlbúa þáttr, an Eschatological Event: The Traumatic Ontology of Being in Time in Medieval Iceland

<i>Kumlbúa þáttr</i>, an Eschatological Event: The Traumatic Ontology of Being in Time in Medieval Iceland

Suhrawardi’s Ishraq in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism: A Phenomenological Reading of Knowledge and Intuition

Among all the Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) looked forward to a more glorious state in America than history had yet recorded at a turning point in the foundation of his nation’s literature. The belief in human progress culminating in a religion of humanity is the reason that Transcendentalism came into understanding Asian religions and doctrines to which Ishraq (Philosophy of Illumination) belongs. By explicating the phenomenological ontology of Suhrawardi’s concept of light in The Discourses of Philosophy of Illumination and placing this ontology within regard for Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Ontopoiesis (phenomenology of Life) and Emerson’s Transcendentalism, a descriptive framework for such an analysis can be found with an emphasis upon knowledge and intuition. This comparative reading will bring an entire range of genuine phenomenological reflections in Ishraqi philosophy to the occidental forum of Transcendentalism, looking for parallel development and cross-cultural dialogue to reflect an intellectual affinity.

The Motive of Discrepancy in Hryhorii Skovoroda’s Works

The article explores the discrepancy of the form and the content as a philosophical, moral and axiological problem in the works of Hryhorii Skovoroda. Using the phenomenological reading and structural analysis, the author investigates the interaction between the form and the content in treatises, soliloquies, poems, and letters of Skovoroda. The intellectual and aesthetic background of the Baroque epoch to a large extent explains why this motive of discrepancy occupies a prominent place among the writings of the Ukrainian philosopher. The article analyzes the main plots, in which the discrepancy is revealed: vocation against non-congenial work; a real friend and a flunkey; the truth and a false thing; and the heavenly and an earthly city. After considering all these aspects and other crucial issues, it is concluded what makes the problem of discrepancy an invariant motive in the works of Hryhorii Skovoroda.

The Shadow of Affectivity Inside the ‘Is/Ought’ Debate’: Siniscalchi, Fuller, Manderson and Vico’s Ghosts in the Legal Machine

The article reconstructs the is/ought debate in legal theory through a phenomenological reading of the concept of normality. An analysis of Siniscalchi, Fuller and Manderson looks at the issue from the perspective of law and literature, and then applies Giambattista Vico’s rhetorical methodology within the contemporary debate. The question: “is Hume’s law really visible within Hume’s thought?” also paradoxically poses the figure of phantoms and fictions at the heart of the current theoretical debate on law. A history of the phantom placed at the centre of the history of Western institutions still remains to be written, but a comparison of very diverse and incongrous approaches such as the extended order of Hayek, the dogmatic anthropology of Legendre, the eunomics of Fuller and the new science of Vico shows how the mystery of consciousness and the mystery of institutions are inextricably entwined. It is impossible at the moment to draw a coherent doctrine from these conflicting perspectives, but their convocation is sufficient to demonstrate how the theory of law is always suspended between the unknown and the human attempt to inhabit it, moving us toward an affective turn that has yet to be fully conceived in the theory of law, following the iconic turn. The anthropological primacy of fictio and the aesthetic-legal dimension in the constitution of language is not that of a logic and separation from the body and meaning, but the exact inverse, even in the unavoidable constant tension between the two poles: logic is born through the gesture of the body that precedes it, as myth precedes the foundation of the State; the origin of the concept is affective, as Hume, and perhaps Vico himself, would have passionately affirmed.