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The article considers the logical and philosophical doctrine of sophists, which, according to some modern researchers, was more philosophical than their ancient critics recognized. A comparison of the provisions of Aristotle's hermeneutics with preserved fragments of Protagoras and Gorgias shows that the doctrine of sophists was a kind of holistic philosophy, which anticipated the philosophy of dialogue of the XX century. Despite the fact that the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle tried to overcome the relativism and anti-ontologism of the doctrine of sophists, some elements of its dialogism were preserved in subsequent philosophy in dialectics and rhetoric. The first thing you should pay attention to is the difference between the dialogical form of the presentation of philosophy in Plato and dialogue as the fundamental basis of thinking that we find among sophists. The dialogism preserved in the dialectic of Plato and the rhetoric of Aristotle is more a technical method of convincing the interlocutor than a hermeneutical basis, which it is in the philosophy of dialogue and in the method of Socratic discussion. The linguistic turn that occurred in the philosophy of the 20th century includes not only an increased interest in language and accuracy of expression. No less important is the new formulation of the question of the nature of the language. Is language a tool for the formulation of thought as Aristotle believed and followed by representatives of modern analytical philosophy, or does it have its own fundamental status, as representatives of the philosophy of dialogue believe? In this context, it is very important for the philosophy of dialogue to find in the thinking of the pre-Socratics those predecessors who already charted the paths for modern thought two and a half thousand years ago. The second part of the article discusses the forms of the dialogic thinking that have survived in philosophy after the sophists and the role of the sophists' hermeneutics in the formation of modern philosophy of dialogue.

This paper aims to mobilize the way we think and write about fat bodies while drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the body. I introduce Nancy’s approach to the body as an addition to contemporary new materialism. His philosophy, so I argue, offers a form of materialism that allows for a phenomenological exploration of the body. As such, it can help us to understand the lived experiences of fat embodiment. Additionally, Nancy’s idea of the body in terms of a “corpus”—a collection of pieces without a unity—together with his idea of corpus-writing—fragmentary writing, without head and tail—can help us to mobilize fixed meanings of fat. To apply Nancy’s conceptual frame to a concrete manifestation of fat embodiment, I provide a reading of Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger (2017). In my analysis, I identify how the materiality of fat engenders the meaning of embodiment, and how it shapes how a fat body can and cannot be a body. Moreover, I propose that Gay’s writing style—hesitating and circling – involves an example of corpus-writing. The corpus of corpulence that Gay has created gives voice to the precariousness of a fat body's materialization.

This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive forms of violence through a kind of phenomenological necessity. In the first main section, I examine one family of such violence, which usually comes under the label of “religious violence”. I argue that it is not the religious element but the disqualification of context from the realm of justification which characterizes such violence. In the second main section, I examine the phenomenology of duty to conclude that duty, by definition, denies any normative relevance to context. In the third main section, I use this sketch of a phenomenology of duty to propose a hypothesis about the underpinnings of the connection between mass violence and duty, namely, that the notion of duty carries with it the exclusion of moderation, and places the agent before an impossible situation that can only be resolved by violence.

This article investigates the ways in which visual representations reconfigured the body in North Indian political culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While images were meant to transmit and translate ethical conceptions of the polity, communicative modes of the visual medium followed a dynamic that was not a rehearsal of the path taken by texts. As images cut across distinctions formulated elsewhere and drew up new boundaries, they worked to refine and pluralise the understandings of political culture beyond the normative. Pictorial experiments at the North Indian courts involved negotiating multiple regimes of visuality and arriving at pictorial choices that ended up creating a new field of sensibilities, especially the corporeal. An argument is therefore made for the agency of the visual in defining new ideas of the political body that were constitutive of politico-ethical ideals in early modern North India.

Phenomenology’s return to lived experience and “to the things themselves” is often contrasted with the synthesized perspective of science and its “view from nowhere.” The extensive use of neuropsychological case reports in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, however, suggests that the relationship between phenomenology and science is more complex than a sheer opposition, and a fruitful one for the praxis of medicine. Here, I propose a new reading of how Merleau-Ponty justifies his use of Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein’s reports on Johann Schneider for his phenomenology of embodied perception. I argue that for Merleau-Ponty these neuropsychological case reports represent a coherent deformation of the intercorporeally expressed existence of Schneider that through speech fall again onto the common ground of perception, thereby allowing Merleau-Ponty to understand, in the equivalent sense delivered by language, Schneider’s total being and fundamental illness. I then discuss what Merleau-Ponty’s method implies for a phenomenological praxis of medicine, and for the role of science in this praxis.

In The question concerning technology, Heidegger explores actuality in terms of danger. In chapter 3.6 ‘Who has forgotten Being?’ of his We have never been modern, Latour typically ridicules Heidegger and rejects no less than his whole thinking path. I contend that this criticism stems from an inadequate interpretation of Heidegger. By reading the latter in a modern register, Latour turns Heidegger into a modern thinker. Leaving aside the matter of modern elements in Heidegger’s thoughts, these are certainly not the elements that Latour brings forth. Indeed, to understand the danger that hides in actuality, if any, we should turn to Heidegger and read Latour from there.

It is common to experience hostile emotions like frustration, anger and hate in our everyday life. It could be sufficient a mere hindrance obstructing the pursuit of our goals to lead us thinking and justifying alternative actions to our original aim, in a manner that can redirect us to obtaining a disvalue, instead of realising the purpose of good will of our initial intention. Normally, we are unaware of this shift because the emotional process is the only perceived phenomenon. This situation often contributes in a negative way to the escalation of frustration to anger, and even beyond that, to hate. Implying the phenomenological concept of will to power (Wille zur Macht) that is described by Edmund Husserl in his manuscript A VI 8 I, this article philosophically analyses the process of escalation. In addition to the psychological perspective, which shows the personal motivations of hostile emotions, philosophy helps to discover the structural reasons for such irrational uprising. The article presents this topic from the following steps (1) the psychological description of frustration, anger and hate; (2) providing contemporary instances as a showcase for these hostile emotions; (3) discussing Husserl’s argument on the will to power; (4) describing the notion of power and its motivation and (5) showing its connection to realpolitik, where we can easily trace some extreme examples of power and negative emotions in narcissistic behaviors. Significantly, the overarching purpose of this investigation is to delineate the will to power as the underlying principle of experiencing hostile emotions like frustration, anger and hate. Then, the article discusses how the escalation of these hostile emotions alters our goals and values from something that we freely wanted, to something that the blind power unreasonably desired.

Martin Heidegger’s National Socialist political sympathies are plainer and more troubling to contemporary readers than ever before. This paper examines the relation of leader to society he uses to ground his account of the state in the 1930s. But breakthroughs in the previous decade, in Being and Time in particular, make the political ontology he endorses less compelling. Heidegger’s political positions are incompatible with his account of the ontological difference. The power of the leader of the society he or she leads cannot repeat the relation of Being over entities. Ontologically speaking, totalitarianism is a category mistake. Confusing the transcendental domain for its ontical contents, Heidegger refuses to learn his own lessons in ways Eric Voegelin helps us detect.

This paper addresses the question of occasional expressions, as discussed by Husserl in his First and Sixth Logical Investigation in relation to the problem of gestures. It aims to show that gestures are intimately related to the use of occasional expressions and have an indispensible contribution to their understanding. In doing so, the paper points out an important lack in Husserl’s early theory of signification, which has to do with its exclusion of all aspects related to intersubjective communication. The paper begins with a short presentation of Husserl’s interpretation of occasional expressions in the Logical Investigations. Further on it identifies the main source of Husserl’s difficulties in coming to terms with this issue in his problematic treatment of communication, and shows how the consideration of gestures can help overcome these difficulties. Finally, the paper considers some consequences which derive from such a treatment of the issue for Husserl’s theory of fulfillment (Bedeutungserfullung).

The purpose of our research is to determine the main trends in the development of historical consciousness in a crisis society and environment. Our hypothesis is an attempt to systematically analyze modern historiosophical and philosophical-historical concepts, schools, approaches, doctrines that express the essence of transformational processes within the relationship of tradition and innovation - in the development of society and everyday life. In our opinion, modern philosophical-historical and historiosophical views are also in a state of uncertainty, which greatly complicates the solution of our research goal. But, our approach in the sense of the above understanding of the defining trend of socio-social development, can be proposed as a generalization of the content of history - to achieve maximum freedom of society and man, taking into account all the concerns that are key, as in the anthropological segment of society and in terms of the relationship between society and nature.

The problem of scholarly knowledge strata is one of the key subjects in modern philosophy of science and epistemology (theory of knowledge). The threelevel model is the most popular in the document sphere as a sociocultural domain; it comprises empirical, theoretical and philosophical scientific knowledge. The author describes collision and contradictions between theoretical documentology and the empirical disciplines of document studies and book studies. He appraises achievements of empirical knowledge in the documentosphere and compares theoretical and methodological ways of three types: informational, conventional and medialogical ones. The author is skeptical about the following statement: the concept of document is relative, conventional and conditional in its essence. The author examines “The Strategy for Librarianship in the Russian Federation for the Period up to the Year 2030”. He insists that the Strategy has to be supported by the scientific strategy aimed to promote each level of empirical, theoretical and philosophical knowledge. He is also concerned about lacking philosophical level in document studies. The wisdom of philosophy lies in its comprising both rational and irrational sides of objects being studied. With document rational and irrational attributes in view, he offers the philosophical definition of document: document is the statement of humanness within social environment and historical time. This definition comprises anthropological and national variations of homo sapiens and philosophical concept of humanness as the unity of the opposite universal principles – the material and ideal.

We live in a world where it is impossible to exist without, and beyond, technologies. Despite this omnipresence, we tend to overlook their influence on us. The vigorously developing approach of postphenomenology, combining insights from phenomenology and pragmatism, focuses on the so-called technological mediation, i.e., on how technologies as mediators of human-world relations influence the appearing of both the world and the human beings in it. My analysis aims at demonstrating both the methodological weaknesses and open possibilities of postphenomenology. After summarizing its essentials, I will scrutinize, first, its ability to turn to the technological things themselves and, second, the so-called empirical turn as realized by postphenomenology. By assessing its conceptual framework from the phenomenological perspective, I hope to demonstrate that postphenomenology needs philosophical clarification and strengthening. In short, it needs a more phenomenological, and less pragmatic, approach to technology in its influence on human experience.

In this article, I argue against a widespread misconception concerning the nature of things in Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre’s conception of the nature of things concerns the idea that outside of consciousness a single undifferentiated mass of brute being exists which is divided into definitive things by consciousness. I propose a different reading of Sartre’s realism. Such a reading is based primarily on Nausea, Being and Nothingness and Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self states that, contra common conception, there is no brute being outside of consciousness, but rather, a vast multitude of different things.

In contrast to Anglophone debates on personal identity initially formed by John Locke’s investigation of personal identity in the sense of personal continuity or persistence through time, the Continental tradition focuses on what constitutes ipseity (ipseite, Selbstsein, selfhood) in the sense of individuality or uniqueness of the human being “constituted” by its continuous transformation through changing experience. In this study, I claim that contemporary phenomenological research in France—especially the “phenomenology of the event” as represented by Henri Maldiney and Claude Romano—contributes to this Continental discussion in a significant way: it formulates the conditions of personal uniqueness or distinctiveness with regard to other persons, conditions not to be found in Heidegger’s existential conception of selfhood in Being and Time. More precisely, Maldiney and Romano allow us to answer the principal questions of this study: In what does the personal uniqueness consist? What exactly individualizes the first-person selfhood disclosed in Dasein’s relation to death? In my three-stage analysis, I first deal with Heidegger’s conception of selfhood in Being and Time and its limits with respect to the question of personal uniqueness. Next, I analyse Maldiney’s conception of “eventful selfhood” in which he “completes” Heidegger’s conception of selfhood by describing Dasein’s openness to ontical, and yet fully authentic events. Finally, I develop the argumentation by presenting Romano’s even more radical conception of the “happening subjectivity” (advenant), which allows us to return to the second major feature of personal identity: personal persistence. Nonetheless, I conclude that the connection between personal uniqueness and persistence is not sufficiently examined in the phenomenology of the event, which opens the path towards another related inquiry into the following problem: What is the proper subjective dimension or the “underlying thing” (ὑποκeίμeνον) in the background of personal persistence which somehow resists events?

Although the sense of agency is often reduced if not absent in dreams, our agentive dream experiences can at times be similar to or enhanced compared to waking. The sense of agency displayed in dreams is perplexing as we are mostly shut off from real stimulus whilst asleep. Theories of waking sense of agency, in particular, comparator and holistic models, are analysed in order to argue that despite the isolation from the real environment, these models can help account for dream experience. The dreamer might feel an increased sense of control of their dream bodies and a sense that they can directly control elements of the dream world. Such experiences may at times be caused by superstitious or delusional thinking due to altered cognition and changes to the sleeping brain. Here it is argued that some such experiences are akin to specific waking delusions, such as delusions of grandeur, with similar cognitive features. However, other instances of increased sense of agency in dreaming appear to be sui generis and nothing like what we experience when awake. Lucid control dreams, in which the dreamer realises that they are dreaming and that they can control the dream environment, are examples of such an experience although further nuance is required to account for their specific cognitive attributes. Future empirical research should focus on controlled dream reporting conditions in order to clarify the types of experience that occur and determine the relevant cognitive mechanisms that relate to each type.

The relationship between memory and history, which has preoccupied historiography and the philosophy of history since the middle of the nineteenth century, took a particular course in France at the end of the millennium. The forms this relationship took in this particular context have been the subject of heated debate around whether the reconstruction of the past should bear the sign of a moral imperative or, on the contrary, it should be kept away from any moral conditioning. To address this question and underline its particular relevance to the present, I will revisit a significant debate, based around Paul Ricoeur’s interpretation of the duty of memory developed in his book Memory, History, Forgetting. I will do this by means of a three-step approach. First, a short introduction will provide several guidelines for understanding the issues at stake in the debate in which Ricoeur was caught and explanations regarding the significance of the main notions around which the discussions took place, i.e., the duty and work of memory. Second, I will identify how historical debates, political decisions and civic concerns about the past gradually coagulated into two different “camps” in France during the 1980s and 1990s, i.e., the advocates of memory against those of history, foreshadowing the emergence of a historiographical crisis, the stakes of which I will analyse in detail. Finally, I will show how Ricoeur’s solution to this debate, i.e., an incomplete dialectic between the duty and the work of memory, developed on the horizon of justice, continues to have relevance for the present, being an innovative form of “defatalizing” the past.

The transition from “natural” sensation to “phenomenological” perception is revealed since the dynamic temporality within perception is elaborated by Merleau-Ponty. Inheriting Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness and clarifying temporal elements within body schema, Merleau-Ponty assimilates phenomenological temporality into phenomenal body. With the analyses of spatial synthesis in terms of “depth,” the original unity between temporality of perception and spatiality of body is illuminated. It makes the transition from “temporality of (perceptual) consciousness,” to “temporality of body (perceiving)” possible. Further, by introducing the corporeal temporality and its dynamic model into the phenomenology of Nature that is considered as the foundation of phenomenology of body, Merleau-Ponty put forward a new concept of time. Time as Schema in this sense is integrated into symbiotic structure with Nature and flesh in the name of chiasme.

In this paper, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s seminal book, Phenomenology of Perception, stands as a positive resource for articulating both trans experiences and trans identities within both a wrong-body model and a multiple worlds of sense model of trans philosophy. I begin my paper by highlighting the complex relation between Talia Bettcher’s proposed multiple worlds of sense model and the wrong-body model. As the dismissal of either model appears undesirable, I suggest that we attempt to combine the two models. To do this, I turn to Georgia Warnke’s contextual understanding of identity as I ultimately juxtapose her work with Merleau-Ponty in order to give a positive account of trans identities that will function as a bridge between Merleau-Ponty and Bettcher. I then turn to discuss the basic ideas within Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception that are used to ground Rubin’s wrong-body model. As I contend that Merleau-Ponty has more to offer what Rubin attributes to him, I then turn to key passages concerning Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the sexual schema and the intrinsic ambiguity of the body. By incorporating both concepts into a discussion of trans philosophy, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers a non-essentialist account of sexuality that both phenomenologically legitimates and grounds the wide spectrum of trans experiences and trans identities as well as Warnke’s contextual identity through, what I call, our ambiguous-being-in-the-world. Such an account, I conclude, makes possible a combined wrong-body model and multiple worlds of sense model of trans philosophy.

Este artículo es una reflexión sobre el fondo que alimenta toda la filosofía de María Zambrano: el ansia de unidad. Se trata de un fondo alimentado por su propia alma tanto como por su estudio sobre la filosofía moderna y la historia de España y Europa, principalmente. Biografía y reflexión se entrelazan para superar el fracaso y crear una razón que sea base de la esperanza. Esta propuesta humanista recorre toda la obra de Zambrano y para conseguirlo no dudó en transitar por surcos discontinuos.

In this paper I examine the structure of hope and trust from a phenomenological perspective in order to analyze the kinds of beliefs, valuings, and practical dispositions involved in them. I claim that there are some basic aspects of the social world that would be inconceivable without the feeling components of these attitudes. However, since these attitudes are only rational in as far as they involve rational beliefs, valuings, and practical assumptions, a complex theory of reason that deals with these three domains is necessary to understand what is at stake in them. Accordingly, I attempt to sketch central aspects of the Husserlian pluralistic conception of reason and highlight the way in which, when they are rational, the valuings involved both in hope and trust open new possibilities to act in rational or meaningful ways. This leads me to stress the role of the feelings involved in these attitudes, for I claim that such valuings or axiological assessments are based on them. I argue that hope allows us to act rationally in the face of uncertainty and what lies beyond our control. In the final part I elaborate on the idea that trust is founded on hope. I examine what happens when hope is expressed and how being found trustworthy by others implies being capable of establishing all kinds of social relationships, including relationships in which the trusted one is dominated. This opens the possibility of raising ethical questions concerning trusting and responding to the trust of others.

Other people figure in our experience of the world; they strike us as unique and genuinely other. This paper explores whether a Husserlian account of empathy as the way in which we constitute an intersubjective world can account for the uniqueness and otherness of other people in our experience. I contend that it can’t. I begin by explicating Husserl’s theory of empathy, paying particular attention to the reduction to a purely egoic sphere and the steps that ostensibly permit a subject to re-inhabit a world of others from out of this sphere. In querying Husserl’s theory, I consider a series of problems, raised by Zhida Luo, concerning the apparent centrality of bodily similarity in empathy. I sketch Luo’s solution, which involves a shift to tactile similarity. While it makes for a better theory of empathy, this solution isn’t sufficient to make room for the givenness of another person not originally predicated on similarity. To clarify what’s at issue here, I turn to the Husserlian pictures of empathy presented by Heinz Kohut and Edith Stein. I conclude with a remark about what might be required, given the inability of Husserlian empathy to make room for the experience of others as singular and other, for a picture of our phenomenal life to have a shape that accounts for the coexistence of empathy to others who are like oneself and hospitality to others as genuine others.

School epistemological belief is essential as it directly influences the goal and center of education. Following this logic, Christian education ideally aims to guide students to the knowledge of God as Christian epistemology believes that God is the source of knowledge. However, in teaching and learning practices, Christian teachers may be unaware of the world’s modern philosophy and thus unconsciously adopt the practices from the modern educational approach. As a result, the goal of Christian education can be shifted from God-centered to student-centered learning within progressive educational practice. Misleading knowledge and truth may bring schools away from the responsibility to fulfill God’s will in education. Thus, it is necessary for Christian teachers to guide students throughout the learning process to see God as the source of knowledge. This paper aims to critically discuss the Christian teachers’ role as a guide regarding students’ freedom in learning. To this end, this study employs a literature review method. The study concludes that Christian teachers can exercise the God-given authority to guide students in using their intellectual and free-will to serve God and others.

This paper demonstrates that two signature methodological concepts in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, the epoche and the phenomenological reduction, derive from his reflections on the history and significance of epistemological skepticism in the Western tradition. Drawing on his Lectures on Logic and Epistemology (Hua XXIV) from the Winter semester of 1906–07, it is argued that Husserl derives his conception of the fundamental task of transcendental philosophy from his reading of a novel skeptical challenge posed by David Hume’s philosophy—a kind of skeptical challenge that Husserl did not recognize in his earlier treatments of Hume. On Husserl’s revised reading, Hume promotes a certain kind of philosophical “despair” (Verzweiflung) or, as it may be called today, “quietism” as the only possible response to the traditional problems of epistemology stemming back to the ancient skeptics. Husserl’s criticism of Hume’s quietism is presented. And Husserl’s reading of Descartes’s cogito as the first decisive uncovering of the limits of epistemological skepticism in the Western tradition is shown to be the source of two key elements of Husserl’s positive alternative to Humean epistemological quietism, which ultimately become the heart of a novel conception of critical transcendental philosophy. These two key elements are the phenomenological epoche and phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s arguments are presented for the claim that these are essential parts of any epistemological program that can answer traditional skeptical challenges.

This paper presents rational and unanimously agreeable norms in (a) governance, (b) economic policy, (c) constitution and (d) religious and scientific beliefs for civilized coexistence. The basis of unanimous agreeability is that individuals do not prefer to have their wealth (including life) robbed, even surreptitiously. This preference is unanimous because even robbers do not want to be robbed. I argue that unanimously agreeable norms are necessary for civilized co-existence of humans and are consistent with the ancient philosophy (Hindutva), which originated in India more than 3000 years BC and is reflected in Gita, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita . Gita is considered by Courts of India as a philosophical document. The basic ethos of Gita is explicit and transparent: the state (King Dhristarastra) must not allow anyone (including privileged princes like Duryodhan) to take away others' (Pandavas') property even surreptitiously (through Sakuni's rigged game of Pashakhel). The modern constitution ordains freedom through rights to property, liberty and pursuit for happiness of individuals. But it has tacitly allowed establishment of a system (rules) of governance to facilitate surreptitious robbery. Individuals accumulate property like home and retirement savings with a hope to attain freedom, eventually, which they cannot achieve if they are robbed, even surreptitiously. The ancient philosophy of Gita prohibits robbery of any kind and, thus, guarantees hope for individual freedom. The modern philosophy—underlying the established system (rules) tacitly allowing surreptitious robbery—cannot, however, achieve individual freedom. Widespread or inclusive economic prosperity can be attained only if the constitution and rules of law are unanimously agreeable which will be consistent with ancient ethos but not modern philosophy.

This paper surveys interdisciplinary research on gratitude that has been conducted since the review paper translated into German in this issue ‘Recent work on the concept of gratitude in philosophy and psychology’, was published in the Journal of Value Inquiry in 2013. We share progress on our subsequent research, and report on key developments in the field. We revisit familiar themes regarding conditions placed on gratitude, the structure and moral value of gratitude, and the pedagogical implications of research on gratitude, addressing the issue of how the virtue of gratitude should be promoted and taught. As befits a collection dedicated to exploring gratitude’s potential ‘shadow’, we consider again the valence of gratitude and whether it is as quintessentially positive as many have assumed.

In this comment on Thomas Nisters’ “Gratitude, Anger and the Horror of Asymmetry” I propose a different reading of Schnitzler’s short story that serves as a basis for Nisters’ reflections. On my interpretation, the behaviour of Franz is best understood on the background of a traditional understanding of gratitude, one that we can find, for instance, in Thomas Aquinas.

This paper puts two propositions to the test: First, gratitude and active ingratitude are in one sense opposed, yet in another sense they bear a striking resemblance. Second, mature morality sometimes expects us to transcend the quid pro quo structure implied by common gratitude.

In recent years there has been growing academic interest in the topic of gratitude, in psychology, philosophy and education, amongst other fields. Philosophers have pondered the conceptual contours of gratitude and have debated its status as a virtue (Carr, 2015; McConnell, 1993), while educationalists have looked at whether and how gratitude should be fostered in young people (Jackson, 2016), and psychologists have examined the role of gratitude in promoting wellbeing and fostering good social relationships (Davis et al., 2016; Wood et al., 2010). To date, the predominant focus on gratitude has been on its moral and prosocial nature, and/or the positive psychosocial benefits which it confers. In response to this fervent focus on the positive aspects of gratitude, recently academics have called for appropriate critical consideration of the concept of gratitude, and its possible shadow sides (e.g., Morgan, Gulliford & Carr, 2015; Gulliford, Morgan, Abbott & Hemming, 2019).

Editors’ AbstractDuring the 1992–1993 academic year, Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) offered a graduate seminar on Ethnomethodology in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. One topic that was given extensive coverage in the seminar has not been discussed at much length in Garfinkel’s published works to date: Aron Gurwitsch’s treatment of Gestalt theory, and particularly the themes of “phenomenal field” and “praxeological description”. The edited transcript of Garfinkel’s seminar shows why he recommended that “for the serious initiatives of ethnomethodological investigations […] Gurwitsch is a theorist we can’t do without”. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological “misreading” is not a mistaken reading, but is more a matter of taking Gurwitsch’s phenomenological demonstrations of Gestalt contextures in phenomenal fields and transposing them for making detailed, concrete observations and descriptions of organizationally achieved social phenomena. Where Gurwitsch addresses the organization of perception as an autochthonous achievement, inherent to the stream and field of individual consciousness, Garfinkel extends and elaborates this field into the social world of enacted practices. The April 1993 seminar also is rich with brief asides and digressions in which Garfinkel comments about his use of Alfred Schutz, his attitude toward publishing, his relationship with Erving Goffman, and many other matters.

The concept of depth is central to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and informed not only his philosophy of perception but also his thinking about psychology, art and politics. This article traces the ways the notion of depth appears in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in these fields, contrasting it with Husserl’s own phenomenological investigations. The article starts with a comparison of the function of perception in Husserl’s phenomenology and then proceeds with an analysis of how the issue of depth reappears in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, phenomenology of art and political philosophy. I argue that while Husserl’s approach to phenomenology led him to analyses of aesthetics stemming from works of art as random examples, and to non-participation in politics, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology leads to the opposite approach, inviting concrete criticism in art and active participation in politics. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s approach is more philosophically consistent. The choice of particular works of art, and the particular political engagements, can retrospectively clarify the transcendental phenomenological investigations themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger hold firmly entrenched places within the canon of modern philosophy. And rightly so: both are penetrating critics of liberal modernity. Yet we need to ask ourselves whether, as academics teaching these thinkers, we are doing full justice to the more disturbing aspects of their thought. They don’t simply interrogate the axioms of modern life as a subject for intellectual reflection; they have a praxis-oriented project to demolish the post-1789 moral-political dispensation that we tend to take for granted and replace it with a new radically illiberal and anti-egalitarian dispensation. The task of reconsidering the perils of going too easy on these thinkers, or giving them the benefit of the doubt, is made more urgent by the apparent return of fascist or ‘fascoid’ modes of politics, and in particular, the emergence of a far-right intelligentsia all too keen to appropriate these thinkers for far-right purposes.

Gratitude is often perceived from the perspective of economic reciprocity, i.e., from the simple logic of quid pro quo. It is for this reason that Marcel Mauss ignores the topic of gratitude in his famous work on gift-giving, and that Seneca believes that gratitude is something which is given in return: ‘for the benefit that is accomplished by an act has been repaid by our gratitude if we give it friendly welcome’. In this paper I will demonstrate that gratitude is not something that is given in return or a cancelation of debt. Instead, I will argue for the claim that gratitude is the recognition of that which cannot be returned, which leads, in ideal cases, to a sense of responsibility for the other.

One can understand humor in terms of one or some combination of the three types of humor (incongruity, release, superiority) and also by envisioning humor as a finite-province of meaning in the tradition of Alfred Schutz’s essay “On Multiple Realities”. Exemplifying varieties of humor articulated by philosophical theory, especially the superiority theory, which undermines those thought “superior,” African-American humor, from the days of slavery until the 1960s, struggled against widespread cultural suppression, as a brief survey of its history shows. Contemporary philosophical discussions of trust elucidate why it would have been perfectly rational and prudent for African-Americans to avoid sharing humor that vents legitimate aggressiveness against whites even though modified by humor, and yet these discussions present the possibility that by trusting another one can transform that other. One can find examples in African-American folklore, particularly the John/Ole Massa stories, of a dream of doing what was impossible in pragmatic everyday life, namely to engage in a comic engagement with white slave-owners. In that dream, African-American slaves utopianly imagined themselves as able through humor understood as a finite province of meaning shaped by an epoche, form of spontaneity, reduced tension of consciousness, sense of self, and a distinctive temporality and sociality, to express outrage at injustice, transform even white slave-owners, and even win freedom for humorists themselves.

In a scientific article, the author draws attention to the spiritual values of a person, which determine the essence and meaning of the existence of mankind in the modern world. Recognition and acquisition of spiritual strength, good teachings, parables, immortal wise advice in the heritage of our oldest generations is considered as a natural phenomenon of continuity, which will become the basis and support of our national culture, language, mentality necessary for the direction of the future of humanity. That is why the doctrine of humanism, which goes back to ancient Turkic values and goes back to the discourse of the Kazakh worldview and Muslim doctrine, is considered in the article as the most necessary and important part of modern philosophy. The core of continuity in the history of the Kazakh worldview is the problem of humanism, which contributes to a deeper and wider knowledge of the history of national philosophy. Key words: worldview, philosophy, virtue, humanism, good, thinking virtue, good.

Se trata de un comentario al artículo “Autonomía moral ylegitimidad democrática” de Jan- R. Sieckmann en el que se pretende discutir principalmente el vínculo que éste instituye entre los conceptos de autonomía y autonomía individual. El comentario se dirige a demostrar que tal vínculo no es obvio ni tampoco natural mediante el análisis de dos autores de la filosofía moderna que han estudiado el asunto, Im-manuel Kant y Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A partir de esto, intenta también discutir cuestiones vinculadas a la relación entre legalidad y legitimidad, sea en la moral, sea en el derecho y en la política, que estarían por detrás del concepto de autonomía tal como es pensado por Kant. Por último, se plantean algunos problemas para pensar la legitimidad del derecho y de la democracia.

Uno de tantos prejuicios que caen sobre la modernidad filosófica apela a su mirada optimista sobre el futuro, sin reparar en el hecho de que siendo ella misma producto de una crisis, ese optimismo descansa sobre un marcado pesimismo de su presente. En este texto se exploran dos narrativas de corte spinocista (Israel, 2012 y Albiac, 2013) sobre los procesos de configuración histórica de la filosofía moderna en relación con los cambios traumáticos por los que tuvo que pasar la consciencia europea de la temprana modernidad.

Edmund Husserl often characterizes essences and eidetic laws in normative terms. Many of his statements to this effect are however highly puzzling as they appear at odds with Husserl’s general understanding of normativity. In this paper I focus on this puzzle and I argue that we can reconcile most of the apparent tensions between these two dimensions of Husserl’s philosophical thought. In the first part of the paper, drawing on the contemporary literature on kinds of norms, I focus on Husserl’s work on the varieties of normativity. I submit that, on his view, essences and eidetic laws are never intrinsically normative, and that not all essences and not all corresponding eidetic laws can function as norms for their instances. Crucially, however, I argue that, according to Husserl, essences and eidetic laws can function as norms for a range of the subject’s acts. In the second part of the paper I further examine this thesis, thus explaining in what sense Husserl thinks that essences and eidetic laws can have this function. I show that formal eidetic laws can engender deontic and evaluative norms for correct or rational judgments, evaluations, desires, and acts of the will. I also contend that material essences and material eidetic laws also have a normative function for judgments. I conclude that this shows how Husserl’s view makes room for norms that are not context-dependent or subjectively grounded.

David Benatar and Thomas Nagel are both claiming that life is meaningless if judged from a cosmic perspective and both are claiming that our life is absurd. However, they understand ‘the absurdity of life’ in different ways. Benatar’s understanding of absurdity refers to the impossibility to transcend our limits from the cosmic perspective. This is strictly tied to a negative evaluation of our life. According to Benatar we have therefore a reason to regret our existence. Again, Nagel’s absurdity arises from a clash of attitudes we have when we evaluate our life from the subjective and the objective perspective. Absurdity results from the incompatibility of our attitudes regarding our own life. We should therefore approach our lives with irony. I argue that neither regret nor irony are rationally recommended attitudes we should have to our life. I show that Benatar’s transcending-ones-limits approach to life’s meaning does not necessarily go hand in hand with a negative evaluation of our life. Although a transcending-ones-limits-approach of life’s meaning implies that our life is admittedly meaningless from a cosmic perspective it does not imply that it is to be judged as good or bad. However, the irony that Nagel advises is not recommended either, as subjective and objective attitude do not necessarily collide. As I read Nagel’s position the attitudes must collide because of a difference in evaluative certainty. I think this is not true because the evaluation of life is beset by doubts subjectively as well as objectively.

Early Modern philosophy pays some attention to the image of minister of reli­gion. While its anticlericalism is well known, the positive program of pastor seems to be neglected. This article considers the structure and grounds of this positive image, concentrating on the texts of Hobbes, Spinoza and Pufendorf. It argues that the universal and yet subjective natural light turns out to be the key element for the image of pastor. The method of mathematical demonstration al­lows early Modern philosophers to establish the clear and distinct grounds of morality. They demand the same basis for the pastoral care that should consist of teaching and preaching. The same universal and subjective grounds underlie the division of power and authority between sovereign and individual. Conse­quently, pastor is deprived of any form of power except for the power of demon­stration. The doctrine preached by the pastor should be coherent to the natural light. The use of eloquence or any (other) form of coercion is not allowed for him. Otherwise this doctrine is designated as superstition, i.e. political, moral and epistemic evil. This kind of reasoning brings the pastor under control of in­stances of the reason (represented e.g. by the philosophers) and the sovereign. Finally, the assumption is made that the structure of this ideal Early Modern pas­tor sets the limits of rational-legal order of authority of the religious leader.

Does modern philosophy of art reject the principles and methods of mastering the reality of classical aesthetics, in particular, the category of the beautiful, em­phasizing, on the contrary, the ugly, ugly, terrible, disgusting? The authors strive to find answers in the dialogue of great philosophical masters – “Zeus the Olympian of the German classics” by Hegel and the preacher of “progressive negation” on the border of modernity and postmodernism Theodor Adorno. Hegel insists on the transcendental origin of the beautiful as the coincidence of idea and reality, the sensory phenomenon of the absolute, the resolution of con­tradictions between the subjective and the objective, the universal and the indi­vidual, the finite and the infinite. Adorno opposes, claiming the rights of “beauti­ful negativity”. He abandons the transcendental character of beauty and shifts the emphasis to the social sphere. The ugly, the ugly, the ugly should not be hidden. But to portray him in such a way as to arouse disgust towards him, the desire to create a project of “righteous life” But the development of the dialogue reveals that both thinkers ultimately agree on the main thing: the beautiful is inescapable and remains the defining category of both aesthetics and life.

Modern philosophy has shown an unexpected interest in materialism. Why is materialism attractive? Perhaps because of the simplicity of thought, or be­cause of the direct discernment of the truth? Among the new materialists stands out the figure of Meillassoux, who tried to justify the need to move from transcendental and phenomenological idealism to speculative material­ism. But the interest in materialism is even more unexpected among young russian researchers who became volunteers of speculative materialism without hesitation. What attracts them to materialism? The answer to this question can be obtained by analyzing the philosophy of Meillassoux. This article examines the speculative materialism of Meillassoux. His idea of contingency is com­pared with Kant’s idea of productive imagination a priori. As a result, the author concludes that Meillassoux has not found the answer to the question why laws are constant. The absolutization of factuality, on which Meillassoux insists, does not give positive knowledge about the absolute. The inconsistency of Meillassoux is that the absolute is always preceded by an anthropological process of absolutization. The author concludes that speculative materialism attracts by its theoretical simplicity, which, in turn, is based on the full and merciless deprivation the world of anthropological dimension. In the material­ism of K. Meillassoux, an inescapable longing for the absolute is expressed. The speculative materialists want to restore space and time to nature with the help of the absolute, forgetting that the dif­ference between things in them­selves and things for themselves is not based on the absolutization of time, but on the presence of subjectivity. Meillassoux refused subjectivity. He chose the absolute. For him, the subject of philosophy is not the existence of a per­son, but a certain “may-be”.

Fil: Torbidoni, Juan. Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras; Argentina Abstract: This paper analyses the concept of “nowtime” (Jetztzeit) in Walter Benjamin’s “On the concept of history.” It shows its centrality in Benjamin’s philosophy of history, by defining it in opposition to two elements of Kantian philosophy: on the one hand, “empty, homogeneous time,” on the other, the faith in the infinite, inevitable progress of a generic “mankind.” It argues that the notions of now-time and truth as flitting hark back to Benjamin’s early concern about the devaluation of experience in modern philosophy and the need to rescue the ephemeral as a decisive element in metaphysics. Rather than a historical category, now-time denotes an instance of redemption. Resumen: Este artículo analiza el concepto de “tiempo-ahora” (Jetztzeit) en “Sobre el concepto de historia” de Walter Benjamin. Muestra su centralidad en la filosofía de la historia de Benjamin, definiéndola en oposición a dos elementos de la filosofía kantiana: por un lado, “el tiempo vacío, homogéneo”, por el otro, la fe en el progreso infinito e inevitable de una genérica “humanidad”. Se argumenta que las nociones de tiempo-ahora y verdad como revoloteo se remontan a la preocupación inicial de Benjamin por la devaluación de la experiencia en la filosofía moderna y la necesidad de rescatar lo efímero como un elemento decisivo en la metafísica. Más que una categoría histórica, el tiempo-ahora denota una instancia de redención.

One of the most important problems of philosophy is the “critical problem”, the problem of bridge between the human mind and the world, the external reality. It is the question of relations between the subject and the object. The interesting solution for this problem is given by Bernard Lonergan SJ (1904–1984), one of the most important Catholic English-speaking thinkers of the twentieth century. It would be difficult to point to someone who influenced the American Catholic philosophy and theology from the inside out more than he did: that is why he is called the “American Rahner „. He tries to connect the great tradition of Thomism and Augustinianism and, on the other hand, classical and modern philosophy, German idealism and English Empiricism. At the heart of his thinking is the theory of the human mind. With the help of transcendental and phenomenological methods, Lonergan demonstrates that the mental structure of man consists of five levels: the empirical level, the intellectual level, the rational level, the responsible level and the level of religious experience, which together create a cumulative process that leads to knowledge and decision. The most important point here is he act of understanding, the insight, which always has a creative moment, especially on the second and third levels, as an effect of the subject’s work. The correct understanding of this moment enables a mediation between the empirical, rational and idealistic understanding of the knowledge process. Correct action on all levels, faithfulness to the nature of the subject, leads to truth – according to Lonergan’s very apt maxim: objectivity is the fruit of the authentic subjectivity.

Monteiro Lobato leu, citou e recomendou os livros de Friedrich Nietzsche, declarando ser ele o maior gênio da filosofia moderna. Estes dois homens viveram em um contexto de ascensão do pensamento biológico e do desenvolvimento da eugenia. O escritor, como o filósofo alemão, manifestou-se de formas distintas em favor do controle da reprodução humana em benefício de uma imagem normativa de homem. Ressaltamos que Lobato não se entregou totalmente a este pensamento, mantendo uma visão positiva do progresso e posicionando- -se favorável à expansão de medidas profiláticas e terapêuticas, além de ter mantido em alta conta os médicos sanitaristas, por seu papel atenuante na miséria nacional.

The article discusses the reasons why modern formal semantics of natural language is an integral part of a larger philosophical research program for the study of the nature of intentionality. The purpose of this article is to show how research in the field of formal semantics of natural language became the implementation of a large philosophical research program that is focused on the nature of intentional objects, which since the time of F. Brentano have been considered an integral part of mental phenomena. Mental phenomena are opposed to physical phenomena due to their inherent intentionality (being focused on an object). In modern philosophy, it is commonly considered that the comprehension of the nature of intentionality is the key to understanding the nature of consciousness, and, consequently, the nature of man. The article shows that formal semantics represents the structure of the meaning of linguistic expressions, with the help of which human thought is formed, which is one of the main objects of intentional consciousness. In formal semantics, this representation is carried out in a rigorous, systematic, and empirically verifiable way on the basis of natural languages, that is, on those symbolic systems that real people use in real practice to shape their thoughts. The research is based on the works of G. Frege, who laid the foundation for the formal-semantic methodology. Thus, the answer is given to the question of why modern formal linguistics, which originates in the analytical philosophy of the 20th century, is a philosophically significant discipline. This response is a reaction to the objections of skeptics who believe that modern analytic philosophy cannot be considered a direction that has any serious philosophical significance.

How can society be thought of as something in which the living and the dead interact throughout history? In Being with the Dead. Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness, Hans Ruin turns to the relationship between the living and the dead as well as ‘historical consciousness’. He is referring to the expression ‘being with the dead’ (Mitsein mit dem Toten). Rather en passant, Martin Heidegger (1962: 282) shaped this existential-ontological term, which so far has hardly received any consideration. But for Ruin, it now forms the starting point for his “expanded phenomenological social ontology” (p. XI). By illuminating history and historical consciousness with the category ‘being with the dead,’ he gains remarkable insights into the meaning of ancestrality. Concerning ‘necropolitics,’ Ruin shows that the political space includes the living as well as the dead and how they constitute it. The foci of his considerations are the human sciences, above all sociology, anthropology, archaeology, philology and history. Ruin’s book aims at a “metacritical thanatology,” which he elaborates as “an exploration of the social ontology of being with the dead mediated through critical analyses of the human-historical sciences themselves” (p. XII). As a result, in a total of seven chapters, he succeeds astonishingly in emphasizing the political and ethical importance of a scientific gaze that cultivates the interaction of the living and the dead.

Apart from being a pervasive concept of present-day law, human dignity is a phenomenon regularly experienced by people in their lives. Yet before any protection for it can be advanced, it is imperative that an explanation of how human dignity is at all possible be established, including a description of its constitutive figures. Paul Ricoeur made a significant contribution to the lacking phenomenology of human dignity. Despite only rarely using the term dignity directly, he identified and described its three constitutive and interdependent figures—self-esteem, self-respect, and recognition—and embedded them amongst such notions as self, identity, narrative, passivity, bodiliness, fragility, morality, and law. He activated the phenomenological, existentialist, and hermeneutic legacies in understanding human dignity and succeeded in modifying certain sharp-edged structures that have periodically been associated with the notion of human dignity. In this paper I argue that human dignity is a high-ranking topic in Ricoeur’s writings, identify and synthesize the phenomenology of human dignity scattered throughout his works, and reveal the profound existential aspects he attributed to it. Finally, I discuss and evaluate his phenomenological-existentialistic account of human dignity, particularly taking into consideration the contemporary use of human dignity in law and its associated discourses.

This essay treats the contradictions that beset Samuel Hirsch's Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden in order to clarify the nature of the study of modern Jewish thought. I begin by examining how Emil Fackenheim presents the contradiction in Hirsch's thought as evidence of the incompatible assumptions underlying dominant strands of modern philosophy and “authentic” Jewish theology. Agreeing with Fackenheim that Hirsch's work is contradictory, this essay diverges on both the nature of this contradiction and its implications for Jewish thought. I claim that the argument of Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden founders as a result of Hirsch's refusal to choose between three different, and ultimately incompatible, strategies for articulating the relationship between God and human beings. I then conclude by exploring the implications of the collapse of Hirsch's position with regard to the dispute between theocentrists and ethical monotheists and for the field of modern Jewish thought more broadly.

To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: (1) automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, (2) are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and (3) suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction.