Now showing 1 - 10 of 19
  • Publication
    Revisiting Sartre's Ontology of Embodiment in Being and Nothingness
    (Ontos Verlag, 2011)
    In Being and Nothingness (1943) Sartre includes a groundbreaking chapter on 'the body' which treats of the body under three headings: 'the body as being for-itself: facticity', 'the body-for-others', and 'the third ontological dimension of the body'. Sartre's phenomenology of the body has, in general, been neglected. In this essay, I want to revisit Sartre's conception of embodiment. I shall argue that Sartre, even more than Merleau-Ponty, is the phenomenologist par excellence of the flesh (la chair) and of intersubjective intercorporeity while emphasising that touching oneself is a merely contingent feature and not 'the foundation for a study of corporeality'.
      1084
  • Publication
    Foreword to the New Edition
    (Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 2012-04)
    'Foreword to the New Edition', in Edmund Husserl, Ideas. A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson. London & New York: Routledge Classics, 2012, pp. xiii-xxxiii. 
      254
  • Publication
    What is the Phenomenological Approach? Revisiting Intentional Explication
    (Firenze University Press, 2018)
    In this paper I outline the main features of the phenomenological approach, focusing on the central themes of intentionality, embodiment, empathy, intersubjectivity, sociality and the life-world. I argue that phenomenology is primarily a philosophy of intentional explication that identifies the a priori, structural correlations between subjectivity and all forms of constituted objectivities apprehended in their horizonal contexts. Intentional description reveals the structurally necessary, meaning informing interactions between embodied subjectivity (already caught in the nexus of intersubjectivity) in the context of embeddedness in the temporal, historical, and cultural life-world. I shall defend phenomenology as a holistic approach that rightfully defends the role of subjectivity in the constitution of objectivity and recognizes the inherent limitations of all forms of naturalism, objectivism and scientism.
    Scopus© Citations 10  1539
  • Publication
    "There is no brute world, only an elaborated world": Merleau-Ponty on the intersubjective constitution of the world
    (Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 2013-12-17)
    In his later works, Merleau-Ponty proposes the notion of 'the flesh' (la chair) as a new 'element', as he put it, in his ontological monism designed to overcome the legacy of Cartesian dualism with its bifurcation of all things into matter or spirit. Most Merleau-Ponty commentators recognise that Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'flesh' is inspired by Edmund Husserl's conceptions of 'lived body' (Leib) and 'vivacity' or 'liveliness' (Leiblichkeit). But it is not always recognised that, for Merleau-Ponty, the constitution of the world of perception, the problem of embodiment or incarnation, is at the very same time one with the problem of the experience of others in what Husserl called Einfühlung or Fremderfahung and indeed one with the problem of the constitution of the commonly shared world 'for all'. As Merleau-Ponty put it in his late essay 'The Philosopher and His Shadow' in Signs, 'the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being, or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there'. In other words, the problem of the apprehension of the other is part of the overall apprehension of the transcendent world. In this paper I want to meditate on the relations between embodiment, experience of others, and experience of the world in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I will take particular note, as in the title of this presentation, of the claim made by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible that 'there is no brute world, only an elaborated world' (il n'y a pas de monde brut, il n'y a qu'un monde élaboré). 
      568Scopus© Citations 5
  • Publication
    'Let's Look at it Objectively': Why Phenomenology Cannot Be Naturalized
    (Cambridge University Press, 2013-07)
    In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity is constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ‘transcendental’) philosophy.
      1361
  • Publication
      474
  • Publication
    The Phenomenological Approach: An Introduction
    (Universidade Catolica Editora, 2008-09)
      229
  • Publication
    Meister Eckhart in 20th-Century Philosophy
    (Brill, 2013)
    The manner in which Meister Eckhart has been viewed by scholars has changed considerably over the centuries. Nevertheless, the Bull In agro dominico of 27th March 1329 already points towards the future directions that Eckhart research would subsequently take. There Eckhart is described in three-­‐fold manner as 'from Germany, a doctor of sacred theology (as it is said) and a professor of the Order of Preachers'. These characterisations of Eckhart continue to frame the debate – in other words, his connection with the German philosophical and mystical tradition, his status as a University of Paris master and Scriptural exegete, and his role as a theologian and vernacular preacher for the Dominican Order.
      1928
  • Publication
    Even the Papuan is a Man and Not a Beast: Husserl on Universalism and the Relativity of Cultures
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011-10)
    Edmund Husserl’s account, especially in his Crisis of European Sciences (1936) and Vienna Lecture (1935), of the Greek philosophical breakthrough to universal rationality has been criticized as Eurocentric. Husserl speaks of the universality inherent in ‘European’ philosophical culture of the logos and contrasts it with other communal life-worlds, which are, in his view, merely ‘empirical-anthropological’ types, with their own peculiar ‘historicities’ and ‘relativities’. In this paper, I propose to defend Husserl’s appeal to critical universal reason by situating it within the political context, especially the National Socialist inspired philosophy and anthropology of Germany in the 1930s. Husserl’s stance in favour of universal rationality as an enduring telos for humanity is an explicit rejection of National Socialist race-based ideologies that made reason relative to race. Husserl’s assertion in the Vienna Lecture that ‘there is, for essential reasons, no zoology of peoples’ must surely be read as a clear repudiation of race-based doctrines. Moreover, philosophy, for Husserl, is essentially international and every culture contains within it an implicit openness to the universal, although, as a matter of contingent history, it was the ‘a few Greek eccentrics’ who made the actual breakthrough to the concept of rationality open to infinite tasks.
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