This paper offers a new philosophical account of vocations as deeply personal but at the same time also communal and generational forms of multimodal intending. It provides a reconstruction and a ...systematic development of Edmund Husserl’s scattered discussions on vocations. On these grounds, the paper argues that vocational life is a general human possibility and not determined by any set of material values, religious, epistemic or moral. Rather, vocations are distinguished from other complexes of intentional acts and attitudes by certain structural features of their core valuations and volitions.
In his late reflections on values and forms of life from the 1920s and 1930s, Husserl develops the concept of personal value and argues that these values open two kinds of infinities in our lives. On ...the one hand personal values disclose infinite emotive depths in human individuals while on the other hand they connect human individuals in continuous and progressive chains of care. In order to get at the core of the concept, I will explicate Husserl’s discussion of personal values of love by distinguishing between five related features. I demonstrate that values of love (1) are rooted in egoic depts and define who we are as persons, (2) differ from objective values in being absolute and non-comparative, (3) ground vocational lives as organizing principles, (4) are endlessly self-disclosing and self-intensifying, and (5) establish transitive relations of care between human beings. On the basis of my five-partite distinction, I argue that Husserl’s concepts of love and value of love reveal the dynamic character of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity.
Today the phenomenological concept of the lived body figures centrally in several philosophical and special scientific debates. In these wide and widening fields, the concept is used with multiple ...different meanings. In order to clarify and delineate the debates, this paper provides an explication of the phenomenological-transcendental methods. It argues that these methods help us remove the most fundamental ambiguities of the concept of embodiment by distinguishing between the main constituents of the lived body and by illuminating their mutual relations.
At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger rejects Husserl's classical phenomenology on three grounds: he claims that Husserlian phenomenology is impaired by indeterminate concepts, by naïve ...personalism, and by obscurities in its account of individuation. The paper studies the validity of this early critique by explicating Husserl's discourse on human persons as bodily-spiritual beings and by clarifying his account of the principles by which such beings can be individuated. The paper offers three types of considerations. After a summary of Heidegger's early critique of Husserl, the second section of the paper distinguishes between two dimensions of Husserl's discourse on human persons. It argues that Husserl does not put forward one analysis of the being of humans, but explicates two different accounts and then studies critically their mutual relations of dependency: on the one hand, the naturalistic account of human beings as layered beings and on the other hand the personalistic account of human beings as peculiar kinds of unified wholes in which the mental and the bodily are inextricably intertwined. The third section of the paper clarifies Husserl's theory of individuation and its consequences for our discourse on human persons. Finally, the fourth section explicates the conceptual means by which Husserl develops his account of human beings as persons. The paper ends in drawing some conclusions for contemporary philosophical anthropology.
Several commentators have argued that with his concept of anonymity Merleau-Ponty breaks away from classical Husserlian phenomenology that is methodologically tied to the first person perspective. ...Many contemporary commentators see Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity as a break away from Husserl’s framework that is seen as hopelessly subjectivistic and solipsistic. Some judge and reproach it as a disastrous misunderstanding that leads to a confusion of philosophical and empirical concerns. Both parties agree that Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of anonymity mark a divergence from classical Husserlian phenomenology. I will question this view and demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity remains Husserlian in two important senses: (1) it analyses senses in terms of constituting selves and communities of such selves, and (2) it accounts for the formation of experience by the temporal sedimentation of intentional activity. The argument proceeds in four steps. The first section argues against the widely spread notion according to which Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous subject is collective. In the second section, I offer an alternative reading by demonstrating that Merleau-Ponty uses the term “anonymous” primarily to characterize the lived body of a personal subject. In section three, I introduce Merleau-Ponty’s idea of trace and show that for him both the perceived thing and the perceiving body are traces and as such refer to earlier constitutive acts of alien subjects. I then argue that Husserl’s concepts of sedimentation are crucial for the understanding of this idea. Finally, in section four, I show how Husserl’s theory of depresentation informs Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity.
This paper clarifies the distinction that Edmund. Husserl makes between two different ways of understanding other persons, their actions and motivations: the experiential or empirical way, on the one ...hand, and the genuinely or authentically intuitive way, on the other hand. The paper argues that Husserl's discussion of self-understanding clarifies his concept of the intuitive understanding of others and allows us to explicate what is involved, in it: not just the grasping of the other's actual motivations of action but also the grasping of her motivational possibilities. The paper ends by discussing the dynamic character of the personal subject. keywords understanding others, empirical, intuitive, possibilities, person
Several commentators have argued that Husserl's phenomenological project is compromised or even destroyed by Wittgenstein's critical inquiries into our use of psychological concepts. In contrast to ...oppositional interpretations, this paper explicates certain crucial connections between Husserl's phenomenology and Wittgenstein's late thinking—shared views that concern the embodied nature of selfhood and our relations to other selves. In line with certain recent contributions, I argue that there are important similarities between Husserl's analysis of these phenomena and Wittgenstein's remarks on our use of language and that these connections, when noticed and explicated, can help us avoid simplified, barren contrasts and get clear about our actual philosophical alternatives.
Issues surrounding birth and death have been fundamental for Western
philosophy as well as for individual existence. The contributors to this volume
unravel the gendered aspects of the classical ...philosophical discourses on death,
bringing in discussions about birth, creativity, and the entire chain of human
activity. By linking their work to major thinkers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche,
Beauvoir, and Arendt, and to major philosophical currents such as ancient
philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, and social and political philosophy, they
challenge prevailing feminist articulations of birth and death. These philosophical
reflections add an important sexual dimension to current thinking on identity,
temporality, and community.
New Perspectives on Aristotelianism and Its Critics traces Aristotelian influences in modern and pre-modern discourses on knowledge, rights, and the good life. The contributions offer new insights on ...contemporary discussions on life in its cognitive, political, and ethical dimensions.
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