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Inquiry Without Names in Plato’s Cratylus — Christine J. Thomas

An Intensional Interpretation of Ockham’s Theory of Supposition — Catarina Dutilh Novaes

The Young Marx and German Idealism: Revisiting the Doctoral Dissertation — Martin McIvor

Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer — Vida Pavesich

The Effects of the Agrégation de Philosophie on Twentieth-Century French Philosophy — Alan D. Schrift

A review of Reading Merleau-Ponty: On the Phenomenology of Perception

This excellent volume contains most of the papers read at an Anglo-French colloquium on Merleau-Ponty held at the Collège de France in the summer of 2005, plus two additional essays (by Sean Kelly and Mark Wrathall) not presented there. The colloquium itself may have been Anglo-French, but the authors are overwhelmingly Anglo. The book is neither an introduction for beginners wholly unfamiliar with Merleau-Ponty’s thought nor an academic exercise exclusively for specialists. Instead, the collection offers an engaging mixture of textual interpretation and critical argument to those who already have at least a rough sense of what Phenomenology of Perception is all about.

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Articles

“To use a metaphor at a time like this would be obscene”: a study of cancer, poetry and metaphor
Cathy Altmann

Burning Down the [Big] House: Sati in Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary
Frances Botkin

Wounded Space: Law, Justice and Violence to the Land
Jennifer Coralie

Seeing Stars: Reading Melancholy and Power at Madame Tussauds through the Lens of Hiroshi Sugimoto
Elizabeth Howie

Concrete Containment in Late Capitalism, Mysticism, the Marquis de Sade, and Phenomenological Anthropology
Apple Igrek

“Edging Back Into Awareness”; How Late it Was, How Late, Form, and the Utopian Demand
Dougal McNeill

Crisis of Memory

Traumatic Memory and Holocaust Testimony: Passing Judgement in Representations of Chaim Rumkowski
Adam Brown

Recreating Postmemory? Children of Holocaust Survivors and the
Journey to Auschwitz
Esther Jilovsky

Blurring the Boundaries: History, Memory and Imagination in the Works of W G Sebald
Diane Molloy

The British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference
3rd – 5th April 2009
St Hilda’s College Oxford

Nietzsche and Phenomenology

Nietzsche has been important for many thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, yet the relation between his work and phenomenology remains very much in question. This conference will examine both phenomenological readings of Nietzsche and the influence of Nietzsche on phenomenology.

* If there are connections between Nietzschean thought and phenomenology, what form do they take?

* Can Nietzsche be seen as a phenomenologist, or is phenomenological method fundamentally different from his way of thinking?

* What links can be drawn between Nietzsche’s genealogical method and any of the various forms of phenomenology practised today?

* In what respects are Nietzsche’s hermeneutics those of phenomenology: for example, is a ‘physician’ of culture still a phenomenologist, and if so, how?

* In dealing with the theme of ‘Nietzsche and Phenomenology’ it is impossible to ignore Heidegger’s monumental study of Nietzsche. But is it still the paradigm for phenomenological approaches to Nietzsche?

By assessing Nietzsche’s relation to the various phenomenological projects of the 20th and 21st centuries, the conference aims to reconsider the parameters of phenomenology itself – what it aspired to be in the past, and what its validity is for us today.

Speakers

Ulli Haase (Manchester Metropolitan University)
David Farrell Krell (DePaul University)
Jill Marsden (University of Bolton)
Will McNeill (DePaul University)
Graham Parkes (University College Cork)
Andrea Rehberg (Bilkent University)
John Sallis (Boston College)
Jim Urpeth (University of Greenwich)

Conference organizers; Andrea Rehberg and Tony O’Connor.

Further information, including registration details, will appear on the web-site of The British Society for Phenomenology in due course: see, http://www.britishphenomenology.com.

Unfortunately, there will be no space on the programme this year for papers received in response to a call. However, we underline that postgraduate research students and undergraduates are very welcome. Two bursaries will be available for postgraduate students to offset the cost of attending the conference.

To find out more about the bursaries, or if you have any queries, please contact:

David Webb
Faculty of Arts Media and Design
Staffordshire University
College Road
Stoke-on-Trent
ST4 2XW UK
d.a.webb@staffs.ac.uk

Link

Description of Rethinking Facticity, eds, Francois Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson

The concept of facticity has undergone crucial transformations over the last century in hermeneutics and phenomenology, but it has not yet received the attention that it warrants. Following a suggestion by Merleau-Ponty that philosophy is not about essences but rather the facticity of existence, prominent philosophers examine the significance of facticity in its historical context and reflect on its contemporary relevance. Focusing on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, and Fanon, among others, they trace its significance from life-philosophy to contemporary European thought and explore its philosophical implications. The following questions are addressed: What thoughts of experience, of subjectivity, of finitude, of nature, of the body, of racial and sexual difference does facticity provoke? What thinking of language, of history, of birth and death, of our ethical being-in-the-world does it mobilize? Exploring these questions, the contributors offer new interpretations of facticity.

See the publisher’s site for more details, such as the table of contents and the pdf of the introduction.

A review of David Reisman'sSartre's Phenomenology (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

This difficult, flawed, thought-provoking book comprises five chapters: 1. Sartre and Strawson. 2. Pre-reflective consciousness and the perceptive field. 3. Impure reflection and the constitution of the psyche. 4. The Look and the constitution of persons. 5. Bad faith. It seems to me helpful to see it as consisting of two overlapping books: the first, spanning Chapters 1-4, outlines what David Reisman takes to be Sartre's answers to two linked post-Strawsonian questions: how a conscious subject comes to apprehend a genuinely objective world, and how such a subject constitutes itself as a person, i.e. a psycho-physical object. (Anglo-American post-Strawsonians should however be warned that little beyond Chapter 1 of this book will be readily accessible to them; even advanced students of Sartre will have to work hard.) The second, occupying roughly Chapters 2-5, is a contribution to the literature on bad faith that treats in more than usual detail the notions of impure reflection and psychic objects and which highlights the role of the Look in bad faith. Reisman uses Transcendence of the Ego, trs. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick, Noonday Press: New York, 1957 (hereafter TE), and Being and Nothingness, tr. H.E. Barnes, Washington Square Press: New York, 1966 (hereafter BN).

The rest of the review

Richard Polt’s essay:

The typewriter is in the process of becoming a thing of the past, along with dial phones and vinyl records. “Things of the past” are still present, of course — it’s their world that is absent (as Heidegger says somewhere about museum pieces). The context in which these things once fit, which gave them their appropriateness and integrated them into human lives, has slipped away — disappearing, piece by imperceptible piece, until one day we recognize that the Gestalt has already changed, that we live in a new world. This doesn’t mean that the things of the past, these ambassadors from a world that has sunk like Atlantis, have been reduced to merely useless chunks of matter, merely “present-at-hand entities.” Again, Heidegger’s phenomenology of the “ready-to-hand” is instructive: when a piece of equipment loses its smooth integration into a practical environment, it doesn’t immediately become a mere object, but instead, the environment as such is lit up. When a spoke breaks on my bicycle, the entire “world” of bicycle riding, its purposes and requirements, is made annoyingly evident. In the case of typewriters, the problem is not that they have broken and no longer fit in their world — instead, the world to which they belong is breaking up like a melting iceberg, to be replaced by a new configuration which we are only beginning to grasp under the name “cyberspace.” But like the broken spoke, the typewriter draws attention to its world. A thing of the past evokes its world, speaks of it, by appealing to our imagination — by pleading that we draw analogies between what we do now and what once was done with this thing. A thing of the past has magical power because it is a window — a hole in the wholeness of our world (which is never a seamless wholeness), through which we can imagine another world.

Keep reading here

(via wood’s lot)

TOC

Beyond totem and idol, the sexuate other — Luce Irigaray, Karen I. Burke

From nature in love: The problem of subjectivity in Adorno and Freudian psychoanalysis — Sara Beardsworth

The errant name: Badiou and Deleuze on individuation, causality and infinite modes in Spinoza — Jon Roffe

The practical absolute: Fichte’s hidden poetics — Anthony Curtis Adler

A ravaged site: on time and the law — Peg Birmingham

Richard Polt: The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy — Stuart Elden

Stuart Elden, Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation — Richard Polt

Alan Paskow, The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation — Robert J. Dostal

Affective Proprioception — Jonathan Cole & Barbara Montero

Controlling Gaze, Chess Play and Seduction in Dance: Phenomenological Analysis of the Natural Attitude of the Body in Modern Ballroom Dance — Gediminis Karoblis

To Peform the Layered Body–A Short Exploration of the Body in Performance — Helena De Preester

Situated Cognition, Dynamic Systems, and Art: On Artistic Creativity and Aesthetic Experience — Ingar Brinck

Situating Situatedness through Æffect and the Architectural Body of Arakawa and Gins – Jondi Keane

The Uncanny Body: From Medical to Aesthetic Abnormality — Alexander Kozin

Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness: On Being Bodily in the World — Dorothée Legrand

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenological Itinerary From Body Schema to Situated Knowledge: On How We Are and How We Are Not to "Sing the World" — Stephen H. Watson

On Naturally Embodied Cyborgs: Identities, Metaphors, and Models – Evan Selinger and Timothy Engström

Negotiating Embodiment: A Reply to Selinger and Engström — Andy Clark

Disembodied Consciousness and the Transcendence of the Limitations of the Biological Body — Rob Harle

A Situated or a Metaphysical Body? Problematics of Body as Mediation or a Site of Inscription — Andrew R. Rawnsley