Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka expands the phenomenological study of meanings (sense-bestowal) into an onto-genetic inquiry by grounding it in a phenomenology of life, including the emotional dimension. This phenomenology of life is informed by the empirical sciences and its doctrines parallel the new scientific paradigm of open dynamic systems. Embedded in the dynamics of the real individuation of life forms, human consciousness emerges at a unique station in the evolutionary process. Tymieniecka treats the constitution of sense as (...) a function of life, and thus the transcendental constitutive function of the cognitive, objectifying intentionality of consciousness, the purview of classical phenomenology, is viewed as a project that is limited in its scope. According to the phenomenology of life, meaning-genesis is exhibited throughout the various stages of structurization in the evolution of life. This paper highlights the transformative function of the “Imaginatio Creatrix,” which is the dynamic process at the human station of evolution that accounts for humanity’s inventive capacities necessary for the construction of a human world. The Imaginatio Creatrix transforms the more primitive stirrings of the human “soul” into subliminal passions of human existential significance. The enactive theory of the mind corroborates Tymieniecka’s rejection of Husserl’s doctrine of passive synthesis. However, Tymieniecka’s study of the creative function offers a key for further advancement in enactive theory. Three sense-bestowing functions of the Imaginatio Creatrix account for the human expansion of life: the Aesthetic/Poetic sense, the Objectifying Sense, and the Moral Sense. The Moral Sense, for Tymieniecka, is not the product of reasoning powers, but rather the fruit of subliminal passions that acquire their moral aspect through trans-actions guided by the “benevolent sentiment.”. (shrink)

The author juxtaposes two views of morality and the views of man they imply: one represented by behaviourist and existentialist approaches in theories of morality and the other proposed by Iris Murdoch, who stresses the ability to see and recognise morally significant characteristics. In Murdoch’s opinion, a person’s moral development consists in a change in the quality of consciousness as a result of the activity of attention in exploring moral reality. After contrasting these two views, the author confronts (...) Murdoch’s approach with the conception of moral development understood along these lines as exemplified in a character of her novel The Good Apprentice. She also puts the problem of attention into the context of Murdoch’s conception of the transcendence of persons. (shrink)

After receiving a copy of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch’s friend Brian Medlin writes back: ‘So far I think I disagree with what you say in “Wittgenstein and the Inner Life,” but I’ll have to make sure that I’ve understood you aright before I launch into a complaint.’ Here, I reconstruct Murdoch’s reading of Wittgenstein and show its ambivalence. While Murdoch acknowledges Wittgenstein’s aim to dissolve illusionary ideas about the inner, she also thinks he presents substantial theses (...) threatening the reality of inner life. Murdoch’s misreading of Wittgenstein as a constructive philosopher may be what worries Medlin, and it also prevents Murdoch from seeing Wittgenstein as an ally in the endeavour to demonstrate the morally transformative potential of our inner lives. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Context of “Morality” The Moral Worldview Dissemblance and Displacement Conscience The Beautiful Soul References Further Reading.

This collection of essays by leading international philosophers considers central themes in the ethics of Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981). Løgstrup was a Lutheran theologian much influenced by phenomenology and by strong currents in Danish culture, to which he himself made important contributions. The essays in What Is Ethically Demanded? K. E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life are divided into four sections. The first section deals predominantly with Løgstrup’s relation to Kant and, through Kant, the system (...) of morality in general. The second section focuses on how Løgstrup stands in connection with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Levinas. The third section considers issues in the development of Løgstrup’s ethics and how it relates to other aspects of his thought. The final section covers certain central themes in Løgstrup’s position, particularly his claims about trust and the unfulfillability of the ethical demand. The volume includes a previously untranslated early essay by Løgstrup, “The Anthropology of Kant’s Ethics,” which defines some of his basic ethical ideas in opposition to Kant’s. The book will appeal to philosophers and theologians with an interest in ethics and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

In the academic year 1920-1921 at the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger gave a series of extraordinary lectures on the phenomenological significance of the religious thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine. The publication of these lectures in 1995 settled a long disputed question, the decisive role played by Christian theology in the development of Heidegger’s philosophy. The lectures present a special challenge to readers of Heidegger and theology alike. Experimenting with language and drawing upon a wide range of now (...) obscure authors, Heidegger is finding his way to Being and Time through the labyrinth of his Catholic past and his increasing fascination with Protestant theology. A Companion to Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religious Life is written by an international team of Heidegger specialists. (shrink)

This chapter, ‘Friendship and the Moral Life in Iris Murdoch’s Novels’ revisits the subject of sexual relationships, not from the problematic perspective brought to them in Anne Rowe’s earlier chapter, but in a positive light. In his analysis of the educational potential of friendship and sexuality Robert Baker contends that sexual intimacy teaches Murdoch’s characters not only about themselves and their own identity but also about the reality of the other person. It thus acts as a force for (...) learning to attend to the world outside the self which is the desideratum of Murdoch’s moral pilgrimage. He surveys the apparent acceptance by Murdoch scholars that such moral development is necessarily a solitary and lonely endeavour before juxtaposing that impression—given prominence in the M and D scenario Murdoch creates in The Sovereignty of Good (1970)—with the relationships she portrays in her novels. Close readings of the friendship of Tom MacCaffrey and Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) and of Harvey Blackett’s relationship with Sefton Anderson in The Green Knight support Baker’s contention that physical affection can be a guide to the good. Borrowing an image from the latter novel he claims that in her fiction ‘Murdoch represents the moral life not as a lonely pilgrimage toward reality, but as a passeggiata with others in which one gives way to a movement larger than and beyond oneself’ (177), a viable interpretation which reads the passeggiata with an interestingly different slant from other current critics such as Rebecca Moden, who regards it as Murdoch’s ‘metaphor for the nature of human existence’ and ‘a troubling image of the impoverished quality of human consciousness in the late twentieth century’. (shrink)

The most distinctive feature of Murdoch's philosophical project is her attempt to reclaim the exploration of moral life as a legitimate topic of philosophical investigation. In contrast to the predominant focus on action and decision, she argues that “what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being” (AD 293).1 (...) I shall argue that to fully appreciate the novelty of this proposal we need to recognize some elements of continuity with analytic methods of philosophical inquiry and themes that belong to continental traditions. On Murdoch's view, the most important question facing moral philosophy is that of whether and how we can become better. In order to describe moral progress and failure, struggle and ascent, we need ethical concepts capable of capturing mental events such as change in mind, self-examination, and redescription. These concepts are presently unavailable, and this lack seriously undermines our attempts to understand the phenomena of morality. Because of this conceptual loss, we succumb to the mistaken idea that moral life coincides with its scattered outer manifestations, i.e. public acts. Instead, Murdoch urges us “the moral life […] is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices” (SG 37).2 Murdoch's point is that we need to conceive the locus of agency more broadly if we want to understand the complicated machinery of action. But perhaps more importantly, she points out that we may be morally active while entertaining a contemplative attitude, which does not issue in action. The grain of moral life, she argues, is constituted by the.. (shrink)

Part One of this paper defends biocentricism, the view that all life has intrinsic value, against the charge of ecofascism. I argue that theocentric and anthropocentric worldviews are structured by a logic of domination that the radical egalitarianism of the biocentric world does not generate. In Part Two I sketch the foundations of a philosophical anthropology that unites a phenomenological understanding of human existence with a Darwinian view of human nature. The understanding of moral experience generated by this (...) philosophical anthropology moves away from a metaphysical interpretation of intrinsic value toward an experiential account of moral phenomena. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that moral agency is defined by an agent’s capacity for rational reflection and self-governance. It is only through the exercise of such capacities, these philosophers contend, that one’s actions can be judged to be of distinctively moral value. The moral phenomenology of the Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Løgstrup, currently enjoying a revival of interest amongst Anglo-American moral philosophers, is an exception to this view. Under the auspices of his signature theory (...) of the ‘sovereign expressions of life,’ Løgstrup provides a rich moral phenomenology aimed at establishing the ethical value of ‘spontaneous,’ non-deliberative actions, such as those exemplified in the showing of trust and acts of mercy. In this thesis, my aim is to investigate what mode of moral agency, if any, is compatible with Løgstrup’s phenomenology of the sovereign expressions of life. I argue that Løgstrup’s moral phenomenology is compatible with a distinctive medio-passive mode of agency. According to this conception of moral agency, the subject’s agency is constituted not through her capacity to stand back and make a judgment on how to act, but rather in the way the subject comports herself in relation to situations and encounters that are experienced first-personally as overwhelming and encompassing. I will proceed by providing detailed analyses of the core aspects of Løgstrup’s moral phenomenology and his theory of the sovereign expressions of life. In the process, I will elucidate the decisive influence that thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard had on Løgstrup’s way of thinking about ethics. Thus, in this thesis my aim is to contribute both to Løgstrup scholarship and to central on-going debates in moral philosophy and the philosophy of action. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch once observed: 'philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious'. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything - even God. Throughout her distinguished and prolific writing career, she explored questions of Good and Bad, myth and morality. The framework for Murdoch's questions - and her own conclusions - can be found here.

Iris Murdoch once observed: 'philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious'. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything - even God. Throughout her distinguished and prolific writing career, she explored questions of Good and Bad, myth and morality. The framework for Murdoch's questions - and her own conclusions - can be found here.

The novelist blends philosophy and metaphysics to examine the nature and origin of Plato's hostile views toward art and its role in life.

Art plays a significant role in Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, a major part of which may be interpreted as a proposal for the revision of religious belief. In this paper, I identify within Murdoch’s philosophical writings five distinct but related ways in which great art can assist moral/religious belief and practice: art can reveal to us “the world as we were never able so clearly to see it before”; this revelatory capacity provides us with evidence for the existence (...) of the Good, a metaphor for a transcendent reality of which God was also a symbol; art is a “hall of reflection” in which “everything under the sun can be examined and considered”; art provides us with an analogue for the way in which we should try to perceive our world; and art enables us to transcend our selfish concerns. I consider three possible objections: that Murdoch’s theory is not applicable to all forms of art; that the meaning of works of art is often ambiguous; and that there is disagreement about what constitutes a great work of art. I argue that none of these objections are decisive, and that all forms of art have at least the potential to furnish us with important tools for developing the insight required to live a moral/religious life. (shrink)

This essay is a response to Robert Scharff’s “Before Empirical Turns and Transcendental Inquiry: pre-philosophical Considerations”. Scharff digs beneath the empirico-transcendental debate between Ihde and Stiegler in order to critique this debate’s Cartesian presuppositions. He uses the work of Nietzsche and the early Heidegger to further his critique. There is much to like in Scharff’s rich and intricate analytic interpretation but this is also the crux of my critique. The detour into Nietzsche’s and the early Heidegger’s work is ultimately unnecessary. (...) If Scharff looks closer, he will see that Feenberg’s revised theory of instrumentalization already accomplishes the return to technical experience and the critique of Cartesian techno scientific rationality that Scharff desires. (shrink)

In this paper I home in on an ethical phenomenon that is powerfully elucidated by means of enactive resources but that has, to my knowledge, not yet been explicitly addressed in the literature. The phenomenon in question concerns what I will term the paradox of moral perception, which, to be clear, does not refer to a logical but to a phenomenological-practical paradoxicality. Specifically, I have in mind the seemingly contradictory phenomenon that perceiving persons as moral subjects is at (...) once incredibly easy and incredibly difficult; it is something we do nearly effortlessly and successfully all the time without giving it much thought and it is something that often requires effort and that we fail at all the time. As I will argue, enactivism offers distinctive resources for explaining the paradoxical nature of moral perception. These resources, moreover, bring out two important dimensions of ethical life that are frequently overlooked in contemporary ethical theory: namely the embodied and socio-technical environment-embedded dimensions of moral perception and moral visibility. As I make my argument, I will be connecting enactivism with insights from David Hume’s and Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy as well as insights from the field of Epistemic Injustice. As such, I aim to situate enactivism within the larger theoretical ethical landscape; showing connections with existing ethical theories and identifying some of the ways in which enactivism offers unique contributions to our understanding of ethical life. While doing so, I will furthermore introduce two forms of moral misperception: particular moral misperception and categorial moral misperception. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy has long influenced contemporary ethics, yet it has not, in general, received the kind of sustained critical attention that it deserves. "Existentialists and Mystics" and "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals" provide new access to most of Murdoch's philosophical writings and make possible a deeper appreciation of her contribution to current thought. After assessing the recent critical reception of Murdoch's thought, this review places her moral philosophy in the context of contemporary (...) trends in ethics by tracing her influence on the work of Charles Taylor, highlights the distinctive features of her moral philosophy, and suggests future directions for Murdochian ethics. (shrink)

Derrida is typically taken to be the thinker most antithetical to Hegel, and deconstruction to be the philosophical antithesis to Hegel’s systematic rationality. While I do not dispute the accuracy of this perception, I argue in this paper that it does not offer an adequate or a complete picture. Specifically, much about Derrida and about deconstruction is more similar to Hegel than is typically realized. I argue that Derrida’s deconstruction shares a great affinity to the method of Hegel’s Phenomenology (...) of Spirit, so much so that we could identify and articulate a latent Hegelianism in Derrida’s approach. I begin with a description of Derrida’s own project, then offer something of an apologia for his work. Finally, I describe Hegel’s method of exposition [Darstellung] and compare it to deconstruction, pointing out the fundamental similarities between the two thinkers. (shrink)

Background The aim of this study was to explore the ethical challenges in surgery from the surgeons' point of view and their experience of being in ethically difficult situations. Methods Five male and five female surgeons at a university hospital in Norway were interviewed as part of a comprehensive investigation into the narratives of nurses and physicians about being in such situations. The transcribed interview texts were subjected to a phenomenological-hermeneutic interpretation. Results No differences in ethical reasoning between male and (...) female surgeons were found. They reasoned in both action and relational ethical perspectives. Surgeons focused on their relationships with patients and colleagues and their moral self in descriptions of the ethical challenges in their work. Dialogue and personal involvement were important in their relationships with patients. The surgeons emphasized the importance of open dialogue, professional recognition, and an inclusive and accepting environment between colleagues. Conclusion The surgeons are personally challenged by the existential realities of human life in their relationships with patients. They realized that ethical challenges are an inherent part of performing surgery and of life itself, and say that they have to learn to "live with" these challenges in a way that is confirmed both socially and by their inner moral self. This means accepting their personal and professional limitations, being uncertain, being fallible, and being humble. Living with the ethical challenges of surgery seems to contribute to the surgeons' confidence and vulnerability in their professional identity. (shrink)

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, (...) and subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger. (shrink)

These seventeen lectures given in 1963 focus largely on Kant, 'a thinker in whose work the question of morality is most sharply contrasted with other spheres of existence'. After discussing a number of the Kantian categories of moral philosophy, Adorno considers other, seemingly more immediate general problems, such as the nature of moral norms, the good life, and the relation of relativism and nihilism. In the course of the lectures, Adorno addresses a wide range of topics, including: (...) theory and practice, ethics as bad conscience, the repressive character, the problem of freedom, dialectics in Kant and Hegel, the nature of reason, the moral law as a given, psychoanalysis, the element of the Absurd, freedom and law, the Protestant tradition of morality, Hamlet, self-determination, phenomenology, the concept of the will, the idea of humanity, The Wild Duck, and Nietzsche's critique of morality. (shrink)

According to the received view, Kant and Hegel espouse diametrically opposed views of moral motivation. Kant holds that to act morally is to act out of reflective recognition that a proposed intention ought to be made into a universal law. Action of true moral worth can never be motivated by an immediate inclination. Hegel, in contrast, holds that the natural inclination of an agent, who has been successfully acculturated within a just society, is moral action. The received (...) interpretation is right, but it misses a critical part of Hegel's view and it is to this idea that the entire dissertation is devoted. Hegel does not reject Kant's claim that a necessary condition of morality is autonomous action, which is not determined immediately by natural inclinations or acquired habits. He thinks that precisely such action is the origin of any actual, shared form of ethical life. It is in his idea of a founding act of ethical life that Hegel claims Kant's inheritance. ;The founding act of ethical life does not, however, meet Kant's criterion of moral action. Modeled, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, on Antigone's tragedy, the founding agent acts without being conscious of the universal ethical significance of the act; nor does the community the act transforms acknowledge its significance. The lawmaker and the community are necessarily blind to each other. This tragic, mutual blindness is a condition of the most extreme violence. ;Are there, in reality, any such acts? Modern political life has its founding moment, according to Hegel, in the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. The old world and its political structures and institutions has collapsed, leaving action doomed to go unacknowledged. The violence of the Revolution and its aftermath is the condition of the foundation of a new shape of life. Though to be condemned absolutely, it is the necessary condition of the foundation of modern states. The concluding claim of the Philosophy of Right is that war, more generally, is the collapse of the actual life of states and the call to found a new shape of ethical life. (shrink)

The decline of religion and ever increasing influence of science pose acute ethical issues for us all. Can we reject the literal truth of the Gospels yet still retain a Christian morality? Can we defend any 'moral values' against the constant encroachments of technology? Indeed, are we in danger of losing most of the qualities which make us truly human? Here, drawing on a novelist's insight into art, literature and abnormal psychology, Iris Murdoch conducts an ongoing debate with major (...) writers, thinkers and theologians—from Augustine to Wittgenstein, Shakespeare to Sartre, Plato to Derrida—to provide fresh and compelling answers to these crucial questions. (shrink)

Part I. Hermeneutical theory and human experience. Interpretation and experience -- Interpretation and life connection -- Phenomenology and hermeneutics -- Understanding and linguistic existence -- Part II. Intercivilizational encounters : interpretation and ethical subject. Mediation : the hermeneutical self and moral self -- Interpretation and ethics of virtue : Aristotle revisited -- Intercivilizational encounters : the mean in Confucian ethics -- Thomas Aquinas : theological virtue ethics and analogy -- A comparative religious study of Aquinas and Mengzi (...) -- Part III. Aftermath of modernity : discourse reason and ethics of the other. Interpretation in long route and social location -- Discourse ethics and communicative rationality -- Neo-Aristotelian ethics and neo-Kantian framework -- Aesthetics of existence and ethics of alterity -- Part IV. Intercivilizational reconstruction in the aftermath of colonialism. Intercivilizational reconstruction and global-critical inquiry -- Engaging the Cave and the Butterfly : dialectics of Enlightenment and neo-Confucian self -- Interpretations as conflict and creativity : retrieval of Wang Yangming -- Concluding reflection : the hermeneutical self and an ethical difference -- Epilogue: Interpretive reason and postcolonial irregularity. (shrink)

Derrida is typically taken to be the thinker most antithetical to Hegel, and deconstruction to be the philosophical antithesis to Hegel’s systematic rationality. While I do not dispute the accuracy of this perception, I argue in this paper that it does not offer an adequate or a complete picture. Specifically, much about Derrida and about deconstruction is more similar to Hegel than is typically realized. I argue that Derrida’s deconstruction shares a great affinity to the method of Hegel’s Phenomenology (...) of Spirit, so much so that we could identify and articulate a latent Hegelianism in Derrida’s approach. I begin with a description of Derrida’s own project, then offer something of an apologia for his work. Finally, I describe Hegel’s method of exposition [Darstellung] and compare it to deconstruction, pointing out the fundamental similarities between the two thinkers. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine how Ricœur’s critique of Husserl’s and Levinas’s notions of intersubjectivity informs his own alternative conceptualization of the intra- and interpersonal as a complex intertwining of moral selfhood and a just community. My first assumption is that law, as a prescriptive intervention in the social structure of our communal life, presupposes a phenomenology of our “being with others”. My second assumption is that Ricœur’s entire philosophical anthropology, and specifically his ideas (...) on ethics, legality and justice, can be read as a prolonged response to Husserl’s solipsistic deadlock in the famous Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Taken together these two assumptions connect Ricœur’s early analysis of phenomenology with his complex reconceptualization of moral selfhood in Oneself as Another, culminating in the ethical maxim of “a good life with and for others in just institutions.”. (shrink)

Reading the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch alongside film enables us to see Murdoch's notions of practical moral good in action. For Murdoch, moral philosophy can be seen as “a more systematic and reflective extension of what ordinary moral agents are continually doing”. Murdoch can help us further by her consideration of the value of a moral fable: does a morally important fable always imply universal rules? And how do we decide whether a fable (...) is morally important? By bringing Murdoch and Margaret together in an exploration of the moral decision making of the film's protagonist and our assessment of her choices, we can learn more about the idea of film as a morally important fable rather than a fable that is purely decorative. (shrink)

In her essay “The Idea of Perfection,” Iris Murdoch argues that sustained attention directed towards another can result in a person’s moral improvement by getting them to have a more accurate view of the other. In this essay, I argue that the award-winning film My Octopus Teacher illustrates Murdoch’s view and corrects some of its shortcomings. It illustrates Murdoch’s claim by showing how one of the filmmaker’s sustained attention directed at an octopus results not only in an alternation in (...) the filmmaker’s view of the cephalopod but also transforms his life by making him more open to others. Because the central relationship in the film is one between a human being and a cephalopod, the film also corrects the anthropocentric bias in Murdoch’s account by showing that a human being can have a transformative relationship with a creature as alien appearing as an octopus. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Betrayal of Substance: Death, Literature, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Mary C. RawlinsonShannon Hoff (bio)Mary C. Rawlinson, The Betrayal of Substance: Death, Literature, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” New York: University Press, 2021, 215 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-19905-6Mary rawlinson shows that to be genuinely receptive to a philosophical text one must be creative, and she brings the Phenomenology (...) of Spirit to life with her reading. It speaks of and to experience, and she makes it resound as such, matching its aptitude with her own rich descriptions of the character of experience. The reader is bound to learn a lot from her careful and vivid analyses of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, where she displays her power to digest a text that is almost impossibly unwieldy. Both students and scholars of Hegel’s philosophy will find satisfaction here: her book will spark understanding and excitement in inexperienced readers and hone approaches to complex issues of interpretation in experienced ones.Rawlinson opens The Betrayal of Substance with the provocative thesis that Hegel “writes with both hands” (xv). On the one hand, he affirms the abundance of difference in life by insisting on the material realization of the abstract concept, on the life of the singleton (her translation of das Einzelne) as the site of this realization, and on the difference intrinsic to identities (xiii). On the other hand, she says, he aims at a science of logic beyond phenomenology, where singularity has been erased and difference comprehended, such that “nothing is other to it”; this is “an unrelenting insistence on an absolute [End Page 225] detachment from life” (53). Rawlinson tracks this severance of concept and life throughout the Phenomenology: in the abandonment of sensuousness in sense-certainty; in the thing’s dissolution in perception; in “the ‘loss of reality’ of the play of forces”; in the struggle to the death, where self-consciousness “risks life absolutely” (66); in stoicism and skepticism, which “install an absolute difference between life and thought” (47). The life of the singleton is severed from the concept by the production (on the part of the unhappy consciousness) of “ethics, culture, morality, and religion as institutional infrastructures sustaining the self-transcendence of the singleton in the ‘we’ of a community” (66); by reason’s erasure of singularity in its accomplishment of a universal consciousness (68); by perpetual reference to the Bacchanalian revel, that “frenzy of the group that survives [the singleton’s] collapse” (xxx). (Indeed, one of the book’s contributions is its illumination of the prevalence of the image of the revel in Hegel’s text.)In response, Rawlinson asserts the need for a double reading of this double writing: (1) to affirm the capacious narrative that dislodges “ready-made abstractions” and engages the “thick richness of life,” because that is where the truth lies (xxix–xxx); and (2) to oppose Hegel’s “completion” of the phenomenological project and the departure from it to logic, and with it the erasure of the singleton. The book reflects the style of this double reading at each turn, in turns rebellious and appreciative, at ease with its own ambiguity toward Hegel. Rawlinson produces three central pieces of evidence for her critique, three “dangling threads [that] refuse to be woven into the completed fabric of absolute knowing[:] sexual difference, the mortality of the singleton,... and the differences of style in art and literature” (xv). Her critique of Hegel’s abandonment of life sets in relief the critical centrality of Hegel’s identification of maternal love as “the most dangerous force with which the state must contend” (68): this love is a clear instance of affirmation of the singleton over the “we” in which it is submerged. Finally, Rawlinson opposes the idea that truth is “the fully realized series of shapes of knowing and figures of truth” in which “science will have been the truth of phenomenology” with the hypothesis instead that “phenomenology will prove to have been the truth of science” (xliv).Itself beginning several times, The Betrayal of Substance thematizes Hegel’s multiple beginnings and the insight ref lected thereby... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Truth and Receptivity Receptivity and God Overwhelming Evidence Sufficient Evidence Pascal and the Search for God Brainwashing Yourself? The Practice of Atheism Resisting Belief Notes.

The purpose of the article is the deployment of the philosophem of “death of man” in the films by M. Haneke. Such a statement of the problem is due to the understanding of art as the ground of philosophy that was to a certain extent already proclaimed by Nietzsche. The art provides such means of relation to the truth, which are deprived of rigid conceptualization and are working basing on the freedom of both the author and the recipient. This is (...) characteristic of the non-classical type of philosophy. In XX–XXI centuries special care is taken over the elimination of subjectivist excessive theorizing, while retaining the attention to the experience of consciousness, phenomenology provides its version of attention to the true meaning with its intention to the reduction of redundant constructions and the discovery of the face and voice of intentional objectivity. If verbal art certainly tends to verbalized judgment, then the cinema provides the possibility of holistic visual, auditory and semantic perception. Novelty is due to this approach, when the appeal to the cinema is carried out in the interests of philosophy: we get the opportunity to get into the advanced experience, avoiding verbal transcription. This provides the possibility of implementing a philosophical set on critical thinking in the Kantian sense of understanding of the primordial principles invisible in everyday life. Haneke builds his cinema as an open question without a direct answer, which has the purpose of excite the mind and consciousness of the viewer. The active agent of the events is the moral dimension of personal life. According to Haneke, it is in this that one can see the foundations of human existence, the ineffectiveness of the moral and ethical dimension eliminates human in man, which becomes identical with death. Haneke’s interest in truth and contradiction is realized as a radical inquiry about the principles of civilization, which is exacerbated when the usual way of life is destroyed and the system of values does not work. The idea of European civilization moving beyond its own limits possesses not always clearly identified foundations. Contrary to the technocratic variants of the Übermensch as a posthuman, philosophical cinema Haneke returns the significance of personality-existential ethical practices, which involve critique and analytical comprehension of the principles of their own existence. (shrink)

The idea of the constructed character of social reality implies human contribution to institutional arrangements and cultural patterns that determine the shape of collective existence. The article examines the specific features of social construction seen and studied in phenomenological approach by A. Schutz, P. Berger, Th. Luckmann. The concept reveals significance of daily cognitive style which enables people to structure and understand the world they share with others, escaping situations fraught with gaps of meanings and anomy. The author of the (...) article analyzes the process of social construction, distinguishing it from imaginary building of reality that goes beyond the existed order. Reality of daily life is compared with fictional society represented in J.L. Borges’ “Lottery in Babylon”. Telling about the social construction as it may be, the story demonstrates the similarities between the mental procedures that underlie real and antiutopian routines. The article also centers on peculiarities of phenomenological beholder’s attitude towards sociality. On the one hand, it tends to be free from any theoretical abstractions, imaginary constructions or critical destruction of reality, on the other - inclines to transcend the reified forms of social being and engenders a certain critical message. (shrink)

The removal of life-sustaining treatment often brings physicians into conflict with patients. Because of their moral beliefs physicians often respond slowly to the request of patients or their families. People in bioethics have been quick to recommend that in cases of conflict the physician should simply sign off the case and “step aside”. This is not easily done psychologically or morally. Such a resolution also masks a number of more subtle, quite trouble some problems that conflict with the (...) commitment to toleration and moral diversity that it is intended to support. These conflicts are detailed and evaluated. (shrink)

From the concrete experience of war, Michael S. Yandell constructs a phenomenology of “negative revelation” in which false or distorted claims of goodness and justice disintegrate and become meaningless, adding depth to the term moral injury.

This chapter contains sections titled: Arendt's singular project Defining the deed Hierarchy and interdependence in the vita activa Praxis in the professions.

Grey’s Anatomy focuses on the personal and professional life of protagonist Meredith Grey. Throughout the long series, a consistent theme is that the audience is confronted with moral dilemmas in Meredith’s professional work with patients as well as in her personal life. Grey’s decision-making often breaks professional protocol in order to do what she believes is best for her patients and those close to her. We argue that Grey’s approach to morality is representative of Simone de Beauvoir’s (...) approach in The Ethics of Ambiguity. In this text, Beauvoir argues that an existentialist ethic must reject a childlike approach to morality in which moral rules are absolute and moral dilemmas have obvious answers. Instead, she argues for a rejection of universalist ethics in favor of acknowledging the ambiguity of the moral realm. By tracing Meredith’s decision-making throughout the course of different seasons of the show, we argue that Meredith exemplifies an existential authenticity compatible with Beauvoir’s existentialist approach to ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Theory of Self-Conscious Life by Guido SeddoneWill DesmondSEDDONE, Guido. Hegel’s Theory of Self-Conscious Life. Leiden: Brill, 2023. 155 pp. Cloth, $138.00Guido Seddone’s monograph explores an ensemble of issues centering on what he terms Hegelian “naturalism.” He argues that “Hegel’s philosophy represents a novel version of naturalism since it stresses the mutual dependence between nature and spirit, rather than just conceiving of spirit as a substance (...) emerging and separating from bodily natural requisites.” Seddone avoids scholarly exegeses to address instead “theoretical and systematic aspects of the Hegelian philosophy.” He focusses on “life” and “self-consciousness” as the conceptual keys to those parts of Hegel that remain compelling for relevant contemporary debates. “This book is, therefore, based on the dialogue between Hegel [End Page 361] and contemporary thinkers and strives to enhance our understanding of theoretical and practical issues and to widen the grammar of the philosophical thought.” The book’s chapters proceed from the more abstract to the more concrete—essentially from issues of logic, epistemology, and psychology to morality, society, and history.Chapter 1 (“Science of Logic: The Logical Premises of Hegel’s Naturalism”) argues that the categories of “Teleology” and “Life” in Hegel’s Science of Logic mark the critical transition in his naturalism from the sciences of physics (“Mechanism”) and chemistry (“Chemism”) to biology, as well as from external nature to inner self-consciousness and cognition. Seddone helpfully points to Hegel’s revisions of Kant’s subordination of teleological language (merely heuristic) to mechanical explanation. Most promising is the comparison of the “self-referring negativity” of Hegelian “life” to discussions by Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela of the cell—whose permeable membrane enables it to be more than its merely chemical environment.Chapter 2 (“Self-Consciousness”) takes a rather bird’s-eye approach to the Phenomenology of Spirit, offering a basic reading of Hegelian self-consciousness and Geist in relation to the Cartesian cogito and Kantian unity of apperception. Scattered remarks about animal desire and the master–slave relation could be clarified to better explore a naturalistic basis of the Hegelian conception of mind. One is struck by the dearth of specific texts from the section “Self-Consciousness”: Seddone seems content with some well-known quotations (for example, Geist as an “I that is We and We that is I”) punctuating large generalizations.Chapter 3 does not quite live up to its title (“The Hegelian Theory about the (Human) Biological Organism”) in that it focuses primarily on Hegel’s “treatise about habits” in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Here habit is construed as a second nature, and hence a further step toward self-conscious, relational mind: Habits are “universal ways of the soul, i.e. ways in which individual soul [sic] incorporates feelings by evolving general rules and practices.”The last section of chapter 4 (“Extended and Embodied Mind”) reverts to habits as moments of the feeling soul but dissociates Hegel’s notion of Verleiblichung from contemporary discussions of embodied mind. By contrast, Seddone argues for retranslating Hegelian Geist as “common mind” and juxtaposes this with the related concept of mind (in, for example, Philip Pettit) as “extended” through social entities, with the result that Hegel’s approach is praised as “the state-of-the-art of this topic.”Chapter 5 (“Natural and Self-conscious Agency”) is perhaps the clearest chapter as it presents the dialectic of the abstractly universal will in the initial sections of Philosophy of Right, links this and the Hegelian conception of free agency to his logical category of “actuality,” and proceeds to an illuminating contrast of the Hobbesian and Hegelian visions of society and state. [End Page 362]In tackling attempts to reconcile “Normativity and Freedom,” chapter 6 spends over six pages rehearsing the basics of Kantian autonomy before turning to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically the master–slave dialectic (again) as the critical moment in the evolution of social norms. “My thesis is that self-conscious life needs recognition in order to achieve the higher form of independence created by social acknowledgement and justification, what [sic] fosters the condition for an authoritative reason that can be socially... (shrink)

This review essay of Economics Rules situates Dani Rodrik’s contribution with respect to the 2007–2008 global economic crisis. This financial meltdown, which the eurozone did not fully recover from before the Covid-19 pandemic, led to soul- searching among economists as well as a call for heterodox economic approaches. Yet, over the past decade, instead the economics profession has maintained its orthodoxy. Rodrik’s Economics Rules offers a critique of the economics profession that is castigating but mild. It calls for economists to (...) use more and diverse models without becoming wedded to any single model or an overarching vision. Yet Rodrik ratifies many of the benchmark models standard to orthodox economics and provides little ground for a fundamental rethinking of the discipline. This essay analyses the conservatism underlying Rodrik’s approach, which upholds general equilibrium theory and rational expectations underlying the efficient market hypothesis. It argues that the economics discipline’s scope-creep to maintain its applicability to all human decision-making, and its acceptance of all-inclusive utility functions, crowds out moral sentiments and civic virtue. Thus. it argues that rather than urging economists simply to be more cautious in their application of models to address particular social concerns, instead economists must recognise their discipline’s inherent limitations. (shrink)

Scheler developed the fundamentals of his theory of emotions and values wanting to overcome the common-sensical empiricist and the critical rationalist approaches to ethics. Both refused that there are laws of essence as regards the character, deployment, evolution, and interconnection/opposition of the emotions and their relatedness to values. Scheler distinguished between mere feeling states and the intentional feelings of something (principally of values). Moreover, he claimed that a normative inner organization of intentional emotive phenomena can be discovered. Thus, a corresponding (...) phenomenological ethics of values, based on the ‘rationality’ of the emotive life itself, appears possible for the first time. After a comprehensive elucidation of Scheler’s and phenomenology’s approach to the matter, I critically reconstruct in some detail Scheler’s analysis of emotions as intentional experiences. I examine the way in which Scheler understands intentionality and the way in which he silently applied it in the case of emotive experiences. He articulates three relevant proposals. Intentional feeling functions are turned toward feeling states as their intentional objects. He also suggests that, e.g., a snow-covered mountain, whose beauty has amazed someone, is also an intentional correlate of this amazement as intentional feeling. Scheler finally maintains his fundamental thesis that values are the intentional objects of intentional emotive phenomena. However, he does not develop a clear and coherent analysis of how the three candidates for the place of the intentional object of an emotion intermingle or are otherwise interconnected. In the end, I survey some other closely related problems, regarding his understanding of reduction and of the status of values, and attempt to trace them all back to Scheler’s phenomenological realism. This examination, however, shows that we can use the latter’s analyses as preparation for a demythologized, this time, concrete phenomenological theory of emotions and values, in the direction of a future critical transcendental and persuasive phenomenological praxeology. (shrink)