The fruit borne of the debate concerning the economy of the gift carried out between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion in the 1990s continues to ripen into the present with publications like Anthony Steinbock’s lucid It’s not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving. I challenge and qualify the fundamental argument of this book in dialogue with two principal French proponents of givenness, Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion, against whom Steinbock promotes his strategy of the gift. While (...) Steinbock wishes to displace our relation to the other from giving to loving, I suggest that the discourse of givenness remains the very movement of loving as such. Steinbock occupies a position reminiscent of, but not reducible to, gift-exchange theory, rooted in reciprocity between lover and beloved, whereas I am inclined to move near to the terrain of the unconditioned gift in which loving need not entail reciprocity. My position is not so much a counterclaim as it is a clarification of the inextricable unity between giving and loving. The final section contends that the I enlarge my horizon when I give myself because I do not grasp the other, nor do I expect or obligate the other’s givenness in return; rather in my growth beyond my own self-interest, I allow the other to be given just as the other likes to be given. (shrink)

Drawing on examples from the history of warfare from the crusades to the present day, "The ethics of war" explores the limits and possibilities of the moral regulation of war. While resisting the commonly held view that 'war is hell', A.J. Coates focuses on the tensions which exist between war and morality. The argument is conducted from a just war standpoint, though the moral ambiguity and mixed record of that tradition is acknowledge and the dangers which an exaggerated view of (...) the justice or moral worth of war poses are underlined. In the first part, the broad image of the just war is compared with the competing images of realism, militarism and pacifism. In the second part, the moral issues associated both with the decision to go to war and with the manner in which war is conducted are explored. Was the allied decision to go to war in the Gulf premature? were economic sanctions a more effective and morally preferable option? was Britain justified in going to war over the Falklands? did the allied bombing of Germany in the Second World War constitute a war crime? should the IRA's claim to belligerent status be recognised? these questions and more are raised in this important book. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the importance of philosophy in the dialogue between religious believers and non-believers. I begin by arguing that a new epistemology of epistemic peer disagreement is required if the dialogue is to progress. Rather than viewing the differences between the positions as due to a deficit of understanding, I argue that differences result from the existential anchoring of such enquiries in life projects and the under-determination of interpretations by experience. I then explore a central issue which (...) is often implicit in these dialogues, namely the ontological status of God-world relations. Drawing on the reflections of Hegel on the infinite and the finite, I argue that his version of panentheism provides an insightful way to conceptualise God-world relations that avoids both dualistic and monistic approaches and helps to explicate a holistic ontology of transcendence from within the world of experience. (shrink)

Both critique and an appropriation of a large and diverse body of work, Home and Beyond is a major contribution to contemporary Husserl scholarship.

This chapter addresses Immanuel Kant and the potential impasse of any philosophical account of religious experience. Various attempts within phenomenology are explored to broaden the notion of givenness and evidence beyond the parameters of object-givenness. Then, the chapter deals with a phenomenology of religious experience as an irreducible sphere of human experience, and its unique style of evidence and modalisations. For Kant, experience is limited to one mode of givenness in which objects of knowledge are actively constituted with the direct (...) implication that one cannot meaningfully speak of a religious experience. The recognition of the different quality of givenness in religious experience implicated the significant matter of religious evidence. (shrink)

Moral Emotions builds upon the philosophical theory of persons begun in _Phenomenology and Mysticism _and marks a new stage of phenomenology. Author Anthony J. Steinbock finds personhood analyzing key emotions, called moral emotions. _Moral Emotions _offers a systematic account of the moral emotions, described here as pride, shame, and guilt as emotions of self-givenness; repentance, hope, and despair as emotions of possibility; and trusting, loving, and humility as emotions of otherness. The author argues these reveal basic structures of (...) interpersonal experience. By exhibiting their own kind of cognition and evidence, the moral emotions not only help to clarify the meaning of person, they reveal novel concepts of freedom, critique, and normativity. As such, they are able to engage our contemporary social imaginaries at the impasse of modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

Exploring the first-person narratives of three figures from the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic mystical traditions—St. Teresa of Avila, Rabbi Dov Baer, and Rzbihn Baql—Anthony J. Steinbock provides a complete phenomenology of mysticism based in the Abrahamic religious traditions. He relates a broad range of religious experiences, or verticality, to philosophical problems of evidence, selfhood, and otherness. From this philosophical description of vertical experience, Steinbock develops a social and cultural critique in terms of idolatry—as pride, secularism, and fundamentalism—and (...) suggests that contemporary understandings of human experience must come from a fuller, more open view of religious experience. (shrink)

Exploring the first-person narratives of three figures from the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic mystical traditions—St. Teresa of Avila, Rabbi Dov Baer, and Rzbihn Baql—Anthony J. Steinbock provides a complete phenomenology of mysticism based in the Abrahamic religious traditions. He relates a broad range of religious experiences, or verticality, to philosophical problems of evidence, selfhood, and otherness. From this philosophical description of vertical experience, Steinbock develops a social and cultural critique in terms of idolatry—as pride, secularism, and fundamentalism—and (...) suggests that contemporary understandings of human experience must come from a fuller, more open view of religious experience. (shrink)

This major new work by Anthony J. Steinbock, a leading authority in Phenomenology and Husserl Studies, explores an interrelated set of problems in Husserl's phenomenology and provides an excellent example of phenomenology in practice, demonstrating how its methods and resources shed light on philosophical problems.

This paper has two motivations. First, I want to delineate structurally the dimensions of phenomenological method: not merely the static and genetic methods, but along with them I want to introduce the new ideas of generativity and generative method (Section 2). Second, because these dimensions cannot merely be treated structurally, I want to examine their dynamic interrelation, that is, the system of motivations obtaining between them. I will do this by elaborating the phenomenological concept of "leading clue" (Section 3). Finally, (...) I will conclude by addressing the relation of phenomenology to generativity (Section 4). (shrink)

Addressing the matter of attention from a phenomenological perspective as it bears on the problem of becoming aware, I draw on Edmund Husserl''s analyses and distinctions that mark his genetic phenomenology. I describe several experiential levels of affective force and modes of attentiveness, ranging from what I call dispositional orientation and passive discernment to so-called higher levels of attentiveness in cognitive interest, judicative objectivation, and conceptualization. These modes of attentiveness can be understood as motivating a still more active mode of (...) reflective attention, i.e., philosophical attentiveness, and to this extent, even it would be subject to varying influences of affection. What role, if any, does affection play in a peculiar kind of reflective attention that is phenomenological? I conclude by briefly considering phenomenological reflective attentiveness and its relation to affection. (shrink)

Leading phenomenologist Tony Steinbock intervenes in contemporary discussion around the concept of the gift, providing a critical reading of the main figures on the problem of the gift and offering a new perspective on the gift, situating it in the emotional sphere, specifically in relation to loving and humility.

This volume offers perspectives on the theme of surprise crossing philosophical, phenomenological, scientific, psycho-physiology, psychiatric, and linguistic boundaries. The main question it examines is whether surprise is an emotion. It uses two main theoretical frameworks to do so: psychology, in which surprise is commonly considered a primary emotion, and philosophy, in which surprise is related to passions as opposed to reason. The book explores whether these views on surprise are satisfying or sufficient. It looks at the extent to which surprise (...) is also a cognitive phenomenon and primitively embedded in language, and the way in which surprise is connected to personhood, the interpersonal, and moral emotions. Many philosophers of different traditions, a number of experimental studies conducted over the last decades, recent works in linguistics, and ancestral wisdom testimonies refer to surprise as a crucial experience of both rupture and openness in bodily and inner life. However, surprise is a theme that has not been dealt with directly and systematically in philosophy, in the sciences, in linguistics, or in spiritual traditions. This volume accomplishes just that. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the experience of hope by focusing on experiences that seem to rival hope, namely, disappointment, desperation, panic, hopelessness, and despair. I explore these issues phenomenologically by examining five kinds of experiences that counter hope (or in some instances, seem to do so): first, by noting the cases in which hope simply is not operative, then by treating the significance of both desperation and pessimism, next by examining the experience of hopelessness, and finally, by treating the (...) experience of despair. Here despair is shown to constitute the most profound challenge to hope among these experiences and to be foundational for the others, even though it is disclosed ultimately as founded in hope. (shrink)

"Renewal" is the expression Edmund Husserl used for the social, political, and ethical transformation of human culture (1922-1924). Considering the concept of renewal in the "generative" becoming of a culture, I first explain the phenomenological background in which Husserl approached the enterprise of renewal. I then describe Husserl's concept of renewal as an ethical task. Next, I take up the process of renewal as accomplishing "the best possible." Following this, I discuss the concept of critique advanced in the "Kaizo" articles. (...) My conclusion interprets Husserl's emphases on the urgency of critique and renewal in relation to the generation of a culture. (shrink)

Drawing on and developing the phenomenological work of figures such as Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, Knowing by Heart details the various feelings and feeling states that pertain to matters of the heart.

Perhaps no concept is more central to maurice merleau-ponty's philosophy than his concept of depth. not only did merleau-ponty recognize the philosophical significance of depth for articulating a phenomenology of perception, but he saw it as essential for pursuing and expressing a novel, radical ontology. depth, merleau-ponty writes, is ``the most existential dimension,'' ``the dimension of dimensions''; it is the ``sine qua non'' of the world and being. let me elucidate merleau-ponty's radical concept of depth by ``addressing'' the salient contexts (...) in which he approached this notion. in the first part of this paper, i shall examine depth in the experience of perception and schizophrenia. in the second, i shall discuss depth as descriptive of an ontology of ``flesh'' and as the guiding theme for the philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

Les recherches sur le phénomène de l’attention prennent en général leur départ dans la nature de la conscience, dans sa relation avec les choses du monde. Cette approche fondamentale concerne aussi bien la démarche empirique de la psychologie que la démarche philosophique et phénoménologique. Dans le premier cas, l’attention est considérée comme la réponse mentale à un stimulus issu d’un objet – réponse qui, de son côté, projette un champ thématique. Dans le deuxième cas, l’attention est décr...

EDMUND Husserl's Crisis was not only one of his most important formulations of an introduction to phenomenology, but also the inspiration for a plethora of studies that have helped shape the direction of thought in the twentieth century, from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phénoménologie de la perception to Jürgen Habermas's Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. It is well known that the problematic surrounding the Crisis occupied Husserl during his last years, from 1934 to 1937. The first critical edition of these reflections was prepared (...) by Walter Biemel and published in 1954 as volume 6 of the Husserliana series bearing the title, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. (shrink)

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the constellation of issues that concern the interpersonal nexus of attention. I do so by drawing a distinction between presentation and revelation as modes of givenness, characterizing the emotional life as peculiar to person, and describing person as essentially interpersonal, articulating the phenomenon of exemplarity in distinction to leadership, in terms of its efficacy, with respect to the types of exemplars, and with a view to how they are related to one another. I conclude by (...) delineating the distinctions between perceptual and epistemic attention and interpersonal attention, and rooting the former in the latter. (shrink)

From its humble beginnings in 1961, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy has emerged as the second largest society of philosophers in the West. From a near-impromptu gathering of a couple dozen participants, those who now claim SPEP membership number into the thousands, with one recent meeting having around 750 registered participants. The fact of its size and its diversity provokes several important questions concerning the identity and orientation of SPEP—questions that are as much philosophical as they are practical: (...) Is SPEP a blanket umbrella organization, or does it have a direction and/or sense? What implications do the latter have for its place as a philosophical organization .. (shrink)

Introduction Il sera ici question de la corrélation entre l’érotique et l’historique, ou, comme on pourrait aussi le dire, entre la vie et l’esprit, et de leur intersection, qui nous est révélée dans le phénomène de la honte. Je traiterai de cette intersection m’intéressant dans un premier temps au rôle constitutif que joue la perception érotique chez le phénoménologue Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Si je souhaite souligner ce point, ce n’est pas seulement parce que cet aspect de l’œuvre de Merleau-P...

Christophe Bouton’s _Time and Freedom _addresses the problem of the relationship between time and freedom as a matter of practical philosophy, examining how the individual lives time and how her freedom is effective in time. Bouton first charts the history of modern philosophy’s reengagement with the Aristotelian debate about future contingents, beginning with Leibniz. While Kant, Husserl, and their followers would engage time through theories of knowledge, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and, Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas applied a phenomenological and existential methodology (...) to time, but faced a problem of the temporality of human freedom. Bouton’s is the first major work of its kind since Bergson’s _Time and Free Will _, and Bouton’s “mystery of the future,” in which the individual has freedom within the shifting bounds dictated by time, charts a new direction. (shrink)