Society For Phenomenology Research Articles

SPEP Co-Director's Address: “The Wind Began to Howl” - Dylan's Antinomianism

ABSTRACT This paper was delivered at the fifty-eighth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). As an outgoing co-director's address, its aim was to indirectly reflect on SPEP's history by directly reflecting on the songs of Bob Dylan. Dylan's first album was released just a few months before the first SPEP meeting took place in Evanston, Illinois in October 1962.

SPEP Co-Director's Address: The Basho of Transcontinental Philosophy

ABSTRACT This article addresses the place, or basho in Japanese, of transcontinental philosophy within the context of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) and the philosophical profession in general. It also considers the role that silence plays in philosophical discourse. The article consists of a series of reflections, or, rather, a constellation of places, that attempts to situate briefly my own philosophical orientation with respect to SPEP, the place that the SPEP way of philosophizing occupies in the broader context of contemporary Western society and its relation to the non-Western world, and SPEP's identity as a unique philosophical community. In taking up these topical places, in addition to the concepts of absolute nothingness, human existence, language, nihilism, and awakening, the Japanese philosophers Nishida, Nishitani, and Watsuji are considered alongside Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Debord, Deleuze, Guattari, Lingis, and Bordeleau, among others.

Towards a Situated Liberatory Aesthetic Thought

ABSTRACTThe following response is divided in two parts. The first addresses some general issues about my Latin American Philosophy: From Identity to Radical Exteriority (Vallega, Alejandro. 2014. Latin American Philosophy: From Identity to Radical Exteriority. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), which was the topic of a session at the 2015 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). The second takes up in depth a point from each speaker: the question of developing “situated thought” as a way to undo and overcome the exclusion of non-Westernized thought and experience (raised by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback); and the introduction of a “decolonial aesthetics” and an “aesthetic of liberation” as fundamental for decolonizing thought and opening spaces from other senses of existence, knowledge, and intersubjectivity (raised by Omar Rivera).

THINKING IN ACTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD KEARNEY

In the second half of the traumatic and explosive twentieth century, thinkers began considering the possibility of viewing our time as a new Axial Age affecting all areas of existence and thinking. In philosophy the interpretation of and of the self in relation to continues to change in the direction of a growing awareness of God's otherness while celebrating this very otherness. An effervescent debate on the meaning of and of God's Other, and the future of a continental philosophy of religion after Nietzsche-Altizer's kerygma of the death of God has been enlivening ever wider circles in and outside American and European academe. Various debates have opened up in relation to this theme and inhabit presently the center of what has been identified as the theological turn in phenomenology and hermeneutics. The contemporary conversation has enlisted prominent thinkers - belonging to diverse generations, intellectual backgrounds, and academic spheres - such as Jean-Luc Marion, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Gianni Vattimo, John Milbank, Julia Kristeva, John Caputo, Catherine Keller, and Slavoj Zizek, among others. Irish philosopher Richard Kearney is a major voice in this ongoing debate, rethinking according to an eschatological hermeneutics, establishing platforms for extensive philosophical conversations as well as for interreligious dialogue centered on a hermeneutics of the heart. Moreover, Richard Kearney has also been a creative agent of reimagining the sacred and enacting a praxis of actualizing the good.Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy, Boston College (1999-present). He has served as a visiting professor at University of Paris, Sorbonne, University of Nice-Sophia Antipodis, University College Dublin, and The Catholic University of Australia. He is author of over twenty books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry), and has edited or coedited fourteen more. As a public intellectual in Ireland, he was involved in drafting proposals for a Northern Ireland peace agreement (1983, 1993, 1995). He has presented several series on culture and philosophy for Irish and British television and broadcast frequently on the European media. He is currently director of the international Guestbook Project: Hosting the Stranger - Between Hostility and Hospitality.This interview was conducted at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) annual meeting in Salt Lake City on October 21, 2016.AF: Good morning, Richard. It is a great pleasure and honor to have the opportunity to interview you today. Thank you for having graciously agreed to it.In answer to the hermeneutic question of d'ou parlez-vous, what would you like to emphasize or add to your intellectual and spiritual genealogy introduced in Anatheism? In other words, what was the driving force or desire that spurred you onto this exceptionally complex and all-encompassing trajectory from Poetique du Possible (1984) and The May Be (2001) to Anatheism (2009) and Carnal Hermeneutics (2015), and most recently to international peace and recovery projects like Guestbook and Twinsome Minds (2016), both important experiments in applied therapeutic imagination?RK: One formative part of my intellectual journey was marked by growing up in Ireland where there was a war going on in the Seventies, waged in the name of religion. As a student of philosophy and interested from the beginning in philosophy of religion, I worked with Denys Turner and Patrick Masterson at University College Dublin discussing questions of belief and unbelief, at a time when sectarian battles were waging in Derry and Belfast. It was difficult not to address hard questions concerning the relationship between religion and politics, how people killed each other in the name of God, asking what idea of we're talking about if ideas can kill and ideas can heal?I was educated by the Benedictines at Glenstal Abbey, Ireland, informed by the monastic motto ora et labora, pray and work. …

Phenomenology and the idea of Europe: introductory remarks

Introduction to the Special Issue of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 'Phenomenology and the Idea of Europe'.

Sex, Ethics, and Method

I thank Cressida Heyes and Lisa Kall for their careful and generous readings, and especially for questions they pose. Even as Heyes and Kall raise very different kinds of concerns, each fundamentally requires that I reflect more carefully upon issues of philosophical method that took me on improbable path that resulted Making Sense of Intersex. I am grateful for opportunity to respond to their criticisms among philosophers at Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Though I cannot respond detail to all of questions raised by Heyes or Kall, I will try to address what I see as those which most directly challenge my arguments.RESPONSE TO HEYES: BACK TO NIETZSCHEHeyes is skeptical of my invocation of Nietzsche and value of my proposal that ressentiment is a motivating force surgical and hormonal normalization of bodies of children with atypical sex anatomies. Heyes contrasts my identification of ressentiment response of medical specialists who promote unnecessary medical interventions for intersex anatomies with Wendy Brown's identification of ressentiment her critique of identity politics Wounded Attachments (Brown 1993): Is ressentiment a generalizable attitude Heyes asks, in which those who deviate from norm are punished for their jouissance through moralizing revenge, or is it (as for Brown) moralizing revenge of disempowered? (Heyes 2016: 795). In other words, it doesn't seem to follow that physicians, who occupy positions of power and authority, can be understood to express ressentiment their treatment of obviously powerless children.To Heyes it might appear that an obvious extension of a Nietzschean analysis context of thinking about intersex would focus, as Brown vividly puts it, on the wounded character of politicized identity's (Brown 1993: 391). Brown casts a harsh light on contemporary claims to politicized identity, what 1990s was often expressed with respect to subjugated racial and sexual categories. Brown sees desire for recognition marked by politicized identity claims, a reiteration of regulatory, disciplinary society (398). Following Foucault-yet critical of what she sees as Foucault's curious optimism his confidence concerning possibilities of resistance (397)-Brown cautions that rather than emancipation, these claims to identity, expressed, as they must be, within terms ofdiscourses of liberal essentialism and disciplinary normalization, effectively replicate or reinforce mechanisms of power that produced subjugated positions from which activists now claim authority (398). In elaborating this claim, Brown brings Nietzsche into analysis, identifying proponents of identity politics and their claims to civic membership and political rights with those slaves Nietzsche's genealogy whose revolt resulted transvaluation of values.Reading Brown today, I might see claims by some intersex activists, including those wholly focused on demedicalizing intersex, an illuminating comparison. The skepticism Brown expresses with respect to prospects for resistance grounded identity claims is a prudent reminder of skepticism we should exercise with respect to promise of legal and political fixes focused on problem of assigning gender to newborns with what is still called ambiguous sex.Take for example acclaim that greeted 2012 German law mandating a sex assignment of X to intersex infants instead of M or F Hailed as an important advance, German law has been repeatedly misrepresented news media throughout Europe and US as offering parents a choice sex assignment of their children (see, e.g., Bendavid 2013; Heine 2013). As Swiss activist group Zwischengeschlecht (Between Genders) explained when law went into effect, this legislation does not fact provide parents with increased options, but formally prohibits registration of children with intersex as M or F Physicians, not parents, are vested with authority to register children's sex assignment. …

SPEP Co-director's Address: SPEP and the Continental Divide

ABSTRACT This address discusses both the organization of SPEP (the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) and SPEP as an organization. I take up these issues by describing the foundation of SPEP in terms of a positive insight into a distinctive style of doing philosophy and a subsequent experience of being other. I then suggest that there is an initial and fundamental phase of openness characteristic of SPEP as “eyes wide open” and another narrowing moment of SPEP that runs counter to this as “eyes wide shut.” In a fourth section, I depict a difficulty in which SPEP finds itself today: a “continental drift,” when SPEP becomes identified with continental philosophy. Whereas continental philosophy might find itself in antagonist relations to, for example, “analytic philosophy,” SPEP does not necessarily find itself in this way. It is therefore necessary to understand continental philosophy as a participant in and from SPEP, not SPEP as an allegiance to a discipline or as an organ of continental philosophy. SPEP is an organization that edges beyond itself and, according to its distinctive style, is characterized by openness to the things themselves and their structures in terms of an orientation to problems, experience, context, and critique.

The Pathological Origins of Authenticity: The Instant According to Jaspers and Janet in the Context of Heidegger's Being and Time

(2013). The Pathological Origins of Authenticity: The Instant According to Jaspers and Janet in the Context of Heidegger's Being and Time. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 44, Life, Truth, Transcendence, pp. 233-251.

Attestation and Facticity: On Heidegger's Conception of Attestation in Being and Time

(2013). Attestation and Facticity: On Heidegger's Conception of Attestation in Being and Time. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 44, On Heidegger, Art, Ethics and Language, pp. 181-197.

Feminist Transformations

Feminist Transformations

Thoughts on Thirty Years in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

Thoughts on Thirty Years in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

Feminism

Feminism

The Color of Change in Continental Feminist Philosophy

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) was the first philosophy conference I attended along with my graduate peers. I gave thanks to the universe that at least everyone dressed better than what I had seen at the American Philosophical Association (APA) as a terrified undergraduate guest during a hire—and that the maleness of the philosophical milieu called the APA would recede for a few days. As silly as these two factors may sound in engendering an increased comfort level with philosophical spaces, it really made a difference. There was a uniform that appeared to pervade the philosophical milieu against which my presence in fashion, comportment, and body fell short. It was at SPEP that I found myself able to take up becoming a philosopher; it was among the feminist here that I could begin to think and take up the question of race. For me, it was always easier to talk about race among the Continental feminists than in the larger population of SPEP. But it was also during this time, as it seems to me now, that race as a relevant and important philosophical topic was beginning to flourish in Continental circles, and thus SPEP as a whole appeared much less hostile than the APA venue, though not wholly without hostility to the exploration of race. The Color of Change in Continental Feminist Philosophy

American Continental Philosophy in the Making: The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy's Early Days

American Continental Philosophy in the Making: The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy's Early Days

Some Critical Reflections on the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and on U.S. Philosophy

Some Critical Reflections on the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and on U.S. Philosophy

The History of Philosophy as Perversion: On Karmen MacKendrick

The History of Philosophy as Perversion: On Karmen MacKendrick

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

A Philosophical History of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy?

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA “You’re a philosopher of history—say something philosophical about the history of SPEP.” So said Tony Steinbock (or words to that effect) when I asked him what he had in mind for this panel. OK, here goes. The philosophy of history was classically conceived as a form of theodicy—justifying God’s ways to man, as Milton put it. Saint Augustine is considered by some to be the father of the philosophy of history, though the term itself was apparently invented by Voltaire. And Augustine didn’t use the faux-Greek word theodicy either, which wasn’t invented until the time of Leibniz. But he thought of it this way. The Roman Empire had recently converted to Christianity and should have been flourishing and increasing in glory. Instead it was rapidly declining and falling before his very eyes. This didn’t make sense. What was wrong? Not to worry, said Augustine. Things may be pretty grim in the city of man, but in the city of God, all would be put right, or rather, already had been, from all eternity. Fifteen hundred years later, Hegel called his philosophy of history a theodicy. History is a slaughter bench, he said, in which the good seemed to suffer, the evil to triumph. Could we find reason or even meaning in this sorry panorama? But reason is cunning, he claimed, and is working A Philosophical History of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy?

Foucault's Nietzsche: A ‘Lofty’ Sign when Putting Power into Question

(2012). Foucault's Nietzsche: A ‘Lofty’ Sign when Putting Power into Question. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 43, Foucault: Politics, Power, Pleasure, pp. 92-107.