This article provides a historical overview of the Existential-Phenomenological tradition in psychiatry and psychotherapy, tracing its development from its origin in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophical thought, through its major European psychiatric proponents and schools, to its emergence as an influential approach in North America after World War II. The emphasis is on the implicit themes that provide continuity within this movement as well as on the distinctive contributions of individual thinkers. We conclude with a discussion of the present status (...) and future prospects of this tradition. (shrink)

Artikkeli toimii johdantona Martin Heideggerin suomennettuun teokseen Johdatus metafysiikkaan. Se avaa historiallisia tilanteita, joissa kyseiset luennot alun perin pidettiin (1935) ja julkaistiin (1953). Johdatus metafysiikkaan -luennoista voidaan löytää epäsuora kuvaus Heideggerin suhteesta kansallissosialismiin hänen rehtorikautensa (1933–1934) jälkeisinä vuosina ja ne dokumentoivat myös filosofian olosuhteita ja ehtoja kansallissosialismin aikana. Filosofisesti luennot kiteyttävät Heideggerin Olemisen ja ajan (1927) jälkeisen käänteen (Kehre) ja esittävät ohjelmallisen luonnoksen Heideggerin myöhäisajattelun tärkeimmistä suuntaviivoista.

Reading numerous readings of Jacques Derrida made by Richard Rorty during the period of the last twenty years or so, one can get the impression that Rorty admires French deconstructionist without reservations, presenting him as an example of a new way of practising philosophy - a way which is private, idiosyncratic and publicly uncommitted, which is original, but publicly useless, which, finally, leads to individual autonomy. A way leading to self-creation, getting out of the influence and power of one’s precursors (...) by way of a para-Oedipal struggle of a son with a father. Derrida in Rorty would be supposed to break with Heidegger in the way Heidegger tried to overcome Nietzsche, and Nietzsche struggled with Plato. And just like Nietzsche wished to be a new figure of a philosopher who "philosophizes with a hammer", but in Heidegger’s reading turned out to be merely "the last metaphysician" and "inverted Platonic", similarly Heidegger in the eyes of Derrida is not - despite the former’s assurance and unshakeable self-confidence - the first post-metaphysical thinker, but precisely the "last metaphysician", the last figure from the "ontotheological tradition" being destroyed or from the tradition of the "metaphysics of presence". Derrida overcomes Heidegger, Rorty reminds us, when he is trying to be the first post-metaphysical philosopher e.g. when he says that "there will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being", about which, incidentally, he already spoke as a broader project in a volume of interviews entitled Positions, telling his interviewer that he is attempting to locate in Heidegger’s texts "the signs of belonging to metaphysics". But philosophical search for fame - and hence immortality - leads to an infinite number of recontextualizations and redescriptions, to new readings fighting with old ones, and the characters of philosophical stories being told are philosophers who are closer and closer to us. And just like Jacques Derrida was not willing to leave Heidegger in peace until he overcame him, putting himself in a new light, similarly Richard Rorty relentlessly bites in his own way Derrida’s philosophizing. (shrink)

Richard Rorty’s approach to fiction results from its consistently - to use here his own opposition - "solidarity-related" account; the "other side", literary self-creation, remains programmatically and intentionally undiscussed with much seriousness. One can just get the impression that literature, and the novel in particular, has been burdened with heaviness of responsibility... Does in Rorty’s reflections the novel appear as a source of multifarious metaphors, of the whole worlds born out of the writer’s imagination? Is there in it another dimension (...) of the reality in which mundane obligations no longer bind the human being and where one can give rein to usually hidden desires and passions? The answer is in the negative. The world of fiction of which Richard Rorty writes is a pragmaticized one - and fiction itself is supposed first to build, and then to defend a democratic, liberal order as one of utopias feeding that order. On the other extreme, let us hasten to add, there is philosophy with its right to choose self-creation. The situation as outlined by Rorty might be described in the following manner: the writer has to be responsible, the philosopher may indulge in certain irresponsibility - or rather certain irrelevance with respect to social problems. It is as if "poets" are returned back to polis after more than twenty five centuries and made to think about the state and laws, relieving at the same time at least some philosophers from the respectful Platonic duty of "enlightening the darkness" of the world. In today’s intellectual climate it is probably easier to accept a new role for philosophers than to accept putting part of the burden of responsibility for the success of a contingent, like it or not, experiment of liberal democracies on the writer’s shoulders. Rorty thus seems to me to be making both one step forward and two steps backwards, as his pragmatism does not allow for leaving society at the mercy of spiritless technocrats, social engineers of the future, when poets and philosophers no longrr have much to say. (The opposite direction is taken by Jacques Derrida. He accords this "strange institution called literature", as he writes, the right of tout dire, of saying everything, the power of breaking away from existing rules and conventions, of questioning and dislocating them. (shrink)

From the perspective of subsequent books and texts by Richard Rorty it can be clearly seen that to have a look at his anti-Platonism and anti-essentialism, it is not enough to read either only Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, or only Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Consequences of Pragmatism and both volumes of Philosophical Papers. For me it turns out that the impression given by various readings of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in Reading Rorty - the first serious (...) collected volume devoted to the American pragmatist - is totally misleading, or at least extremely one-sided. The book, it is claimed there, is merely criticism of traditional epistemology carried out on the grounds of American analytic philosophy not too interesting to a wider public. And yet it can only be seen retrospectively that the book provides most interesting philosophical "foundations" to later, often more metaphilosophical, literary and cultural ideas. To put it in a nutshell: one can find there the idea of solidarity and self-creation, there is the fundamental question about the place of philosophy in culture rather than merely that about the place of epistemology in philosophy; as well as there is a question about the future of the philosopher in culture, about mechanisms of production and collapse of his self-image, there is also the germ of the project of the "post-Kantian culture", "philosophy without mirrors" and criticism of merely cognitive - and derived from Plato - paradigm of human activity. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy about justice, a contrast between empirical and transcendental approaches can be identified. Hillel Steiner represents an empirical approach: he argues for building an account of justice-as-rights out of the minimal inductive material of psychological linguistic and moral intuitions. From this opening, he ultimately concludes that persons have original rights to self-ownership and to an initially equal share of natural resources. Emmanuel Levinas represents a transcendental approach: he argues that justice arises from a transcendent ethical relation of responsibility-for-the-Other. (...) This relation underpins all subjective cognition, and makes rationality, reasoning, and rights possible.Analysis of each of these positions reveals certain problems. On the one hand, Steiner’s argument contains a number of latent methodological, conceptual, and structural presuppositions. These include the pretheoretical concepts of “person”, “equality”, and “consistency”. These presuppositions prefigure and condition the conclusions which Steiner reaches. On the other hand, Levinas fails to provide a convincing account of how the self comes to be an object of my own deliberations about morality and justice. This amounts to an annihilation of the subject which undermines his argument for the subject as a site of responsible action. As Steiner identifies, justice encompasses equal moral agents. Levinas’s hyperbolic description of the ethical relation’s asymmetry must therefore be revised.Nevertheless, what remains is the strength of Levinas’s argument for the priority of the ethical relation over thematization, rationality, and consciousness. The hidden presuppositions supporting Steiner’s work are evidence of Levinas’s plausibility in this respect. Steiner’s account of justice-as-rights requires a prior ethical relation in which we recognise one another as separate persons, each possessing an ethical status of their own; an attitude of justice motivates Steiner’s description of justice. This attitude is evident in language, which is communication before it is thought. In that individual rights can be conceived only on the basis of a relation of responsibility, rights are primordially the rights of the Other. (shrink)

The philosophy of psychoanalysis is distinguished from psychoanalysis. An account of psychoanalysis is developed in progressively more detail. Recently published material is assessed, e.g., Bion's. Some older literature objects to an inaccurate account of psychoanalysis. This problem is avoided by treating the content and method of psychoanalysis as inseparable.