This paper examines the existential context of physical and mental health. Hans Georg Gadamer and The World Health Organization’s conceptualizations are discussed, and current medicalized and idealized views on health are critically examined. The existential dimension of health is explored in the light of theories of selfhood consisting of different parts, Irvin Yalom’s approach to “ultimate concerns” and Martin Heidegger’s conceptualization of “existentials.” We often become aware of health as an existential concern during times of illness, and health and illness (...) can co-exist. The paper discusses how existential suffering in Western culture is described, to an increasing degree, as disorders or psychological deficits, and perfectionistic health goals easily can become a problem. We seek to avoid suffering rather than relate to it, with all the tension that may create. The paper argues that suffering is an unavoidable aspect of people’s experience of their lives, and actively relating to suffering must be regarded as a fundamental aspect of health. The need and usefulness of a concept of “existential health” is discussed. (shrink)

Going beyond the scope of psychiatric diagnoses, this study introduces the concept of human vulnerability as a means of linking the phenomenological approach—focusing on the patient’s experience—wi...

This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled “When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness,” which first developed out of my research work with White women in violence-against-women organizations. It documents an interview between a White woman and me, a Black South African philosopher. I lived and worked in Canada at the time but I traveled to the United States for conferences on a regular basis. I was presenting my work on Black consciousness, White consciousness, and Black existentialism—relying (...) on Derridean deconstruction and psychoanalysis—when I had the exchange with a White woman, a young faculty member in the philosophy department, which had jointly hosted the talk with the women and gender studies department. This paper offers a verbatim account of this dialogue wherein the history of philosophy is unraveled and where I draw on Jacques Derrida's “White Mythology” to demonstrate how White consciousness is engraved. It is out of this intertwined analysis that my work on White consciousness emerged in the 1990s—and with which I continue—as is evidenced throughout the paper. In unpacking this dialogue, I situate the complexities that arise from the pedagogical practices within philosophy when race takes center stage within a discipline that has written itself as though race does not exist. (shrink)

In this paper the author explores certain fulfilling personal experiences that he describes as the presencing of space, i.e. the way in which an individual’s spatial involvement may put him or her in contact with reality as a whole. These experiences are investigated from a phenomenological perspective, and the differences between them and other similar experiences, such as that of the sublime or topophilia, are highlighted. A neologism is introduced: topoaletheia to name a distinctive type of spatial experience. This concept (...) may enrich the discussion about our involvement with space in our built environments. (shrink)

Each thinker, according to Heidegger, essentially thinks one thought. Plato thinks the idea. Descartes thinks the cogito . Spinoza thinks substance. Nietzsche thinks the will to power. If a thinker does not think a thought, then he or she is not a thinker. He or she may be a scholar or a professor, a producer or a consumer, a fan or a fake, but he or she would not be a thinker. Thus, if Heidegger is a thinker, he essentially thinks (...) one thought. What is Heidegger’s one thought? It is neither life nor death, neither me nor you. It is neither technology nor art. It is neither spirit nor language. Heidegger’s one thought is being—or more precisely, the question of the meaning of being. And what is being? Neither presence nor absence--but rather, an ambiguous uncertainty. (shrink)

In the paper, the formal model of the noetic synthesis functions is presented. Together with the functions of noematic synthesis, they are understood as components of functions of intentional reference, which are meant to be, in turn, formalizations of intentional acts of reference performed in the stream of consciousness. This research perspective allows us to extend the category of speech acts to the category of all intentional acts of reference. The functions of noetic synthesis are understood as composed of the (...) function of noetic intention acting on qualia, noetic moods and noetic modes. The model allows us to explain the phenomenon of autism as having its source in disorders of the noetic synthesis functions. The constructed model is not intended as the faithful reconstruction of the Husserlian conception of noesis. Intuitions of the creator of phenomenology are treated as the only source of inspiration. (shrink)

In the midst of a crisis like the climate crisis and calls for ‘all hands on deck’, what do academics, as a microcosm of humanity, see? In Hannah Arendt’s terms, an ‘abyss of freedom’ to act or a paralysing ‘abyss of nothingness’? Some from the academy themselves, including Tamboukou, Apple and Bourdieu, make judgements more akin to the latter and mount arguments to urge action. This paper joins their call and theorises ethical and demonstrably plausible resources as a potentially generative (...) heuristic for political action by academics in the face of ‘dark times’. I develop these resources by initially drawing on Arendt’s ethical, but limited, action process. Then, through interpreting and expanding her unfinished theory of judging and echoing Karl Jaspers' concept The Encompassing, I propose the notion of an ‘encompassing ethic’. This ethic, synthesised with Arendt’s action process, ameliorates action’s limitations and suggests the idea of ‘encompassing action’. The paper concludes by bringing these conceptual resources to life through two inspiring historical examples of such action involving academics. (shrink)