The aim of this volume is to critically assess the philosophical importance of phenomenology as a method for studying the normativity of meaning and its transcendental conditions. Using the pioneering work of Steven Crowell as a springboard, phenomenologists from all over the world examine the promise of phenomenology for illuminating long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, action theory, the philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. The essays are unique in that they engage with the phenomenological tradition not as (...) a collection of authorities to whom we must defer, or a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that bear on important issues in contemporary philosophy. The book is divided into three thematic sections, each examining different clusters of issues aimed at moving the phenomenological project forward. The first section explores the connection between normativity and meaning, and asks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline. ks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline. (shrink)

This article queries the sense of `violence' in Derrida's early work, especially Of Grammatology. After a thorough reading of Derrida's analyses, and an inspection of his own moral and political rhetoric interspersed through his writing on writing, I offer a criticism of Derrida's treatment of violence. Derrida figures socio-political or `empirical' violence as conditioned by the more basic play of the trace; the `transcendental' violence of inscription and law. This move brings him within a hair's-breadth of affirming a violence more (...) mythic than transcendental; or mythic because transcendental and ostensibly `necessary'. (shrink)

A Levinasian reading of intimate and personal friendship – of friendship “otherwise than political”, as it were – suggests that intimate and personal friendship cannot be subsumed under either completely ethical or completely erotic terms. While friendship can be understood as a certain “fraternity”, and thus be legitimately employed in discussing justice and politics, such a usage trades on a certain equivocation. Hermeneutics seeks to make the alien familiar, and deconstruction seeks to show that the familiar is always (already) alien. (...) As this paper seeks to describe, a Levinasian reading of personal friendship involves both of these movements. In that Levinas, however, never explicitly addresses this relationship, the paper proceeds by sketching the broad contours of his thought before offering a phenomenology of personal friendship in the wake of the limits Levinas thematizes in his analysis of the ethical relation. The readings and analysis presented suggest that personal friendship appears as an irreducible excess, reducible to neither ethics nor enjoyment, while nevertheless passing through ethics and enjoyment. Friendship marks a space of non-violent familiarity and exteriority, a site of solidarity between identity and difference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Flipping the DeckOn Totality and Infinity’s Transcendental/Empirical PuzzleJack Marsh (bio)How does one perceive a transcendental condition?— Martin Kavka... if it is legitimate to hold Levinas to the standards that he himself imposes on certain other philosophers.— Robert BernasconiI do not believe that there is a transparency possible in method. Nor that philosophy might be possible as transparency.— Emmanuel LevinasThe question of the precise methodological status of the face has (...) yet to be satisfactorily resolved. The best evidence for this claim perhaps lies in texts intended to introduce Levinas to a general philosophical audience. If even first-rate philosophers wrestle still with the puzzle Totality and Infinity bequeaths us, we seem to still await a full and precise diagnosis. For example, Michael Morgan holds the “face-to-face and the responsible self — they are one thing characterized from [End Page 79] two perspectives — are” “the transcendental condition for meaningful human life,” yet elsewhere concedes, “it is unavoidable that in some sense or other the face-to-face does occur as an actually lived experience.” If Morgan’s own nuanced treatment of this question still lands him in equivocation, the problem is certainly not Morgan’s own.1 As Atterton notes, Morgan must finally hold that Levinas’s method is a “transcendental enterprise of a certain sort.”2 But of what sort? Indeed, this question has been asked or analyzed in one way or another from the beginning of Totality and Infinity’s English-language reception.3 Of course, Derrida was the first to broach the question of Totality and Infinity’s general intelligibility, alleging that Levinas ultimately succumbs to a form of empiricism. Of course, de Boer was the first to mount a rigorous Cartesian reading of the text as an (apparently) “ethical transcendental philosophy.” Of course, Bernasconi’s response to de Boer, and his creative repetition of Derrida’s critical point, was the first to give the problem a precise formulation.4 Derrida, de Boer, and Bernasconi hand us the now canonical problem of what I will call the text’s “transcendental/empirico-metaphysical puzzle.”5 The issue boils down to Levinas’s dual insistence that the face “cannot... be stated in terms of experience,” yet is nevertheless “reflected within experience” (TI 25, 23, 67, 260). How should we understand Levinas’s references to various “formal structure[s]” — “of language,” “of interpellation,” “of the idea of infinity” — next to talk of “pure” or “concrete moral experience” (195, 79, 64, 53)? Does the Other occur in “pure experience,” or is she “deduced” as a condition of possibility for experience in general? In this essay, I will propose an internal explanation for Totality and Infinity’s longstanding methodological puzzle. By proposing to “explain” this puzzle, I am making at least three distinct claims: to show (1) that the text suffers from genuine incoherence, thus confirming the general criticism of Derrida, Bernasconi, and others, (2) precisely how this incoherence follows from the details of Levinas’s own explicit method, and (3) precisely why, philosophically, he may have constructed and performed his method as he did.6 By proposing to explain the book’s incoherence, I can [End Page 80] also make specific hermeneutic predictions. If Totality and Infinity’s transcendental/empirico-metaphysical puzzle is genuinely aporetic, it follows that no resolution to it is possible on the text’s own terms.7 As such, any attempt to resolve the puzzle must either (1) augment the text’s own descriptions, (2) utilize other philosophical resources to render its claims coherent, or (3) precisely attempt resolution in either a transcendental or empirico-metaphysical direction. As it turns out, extant scholarship reflects just these hermeneutic strategies.Over the years many philosophers have contributed to this longstanding debate, variously arguing for or against the general intelligibility of Levinas’s account of the face. On the one hand, scholarship that questions the text’s intelligibility does so from a variety of methodological perspectives.8 On the other hand, scholarship that mounts a defense of the text seems to proceed in one of three ways: by (1) apparently repeating Totality and Infinity’s methodological problems, (2) anticipating Levinas’s later work, read... (shrink)

It is the intent of this essay to sketch a comparison between the thought of Hegel and Kierkegaard. I will argue that their respective understanding of the logic of identity and difference, taken together, offers a dialectically holistic analysis of authentic spirit-full selfhood. By isolating a basic category of disagreement, we can possibly retain their penetrating insights while sidestepping some of the unfortunate implications in their respective positions. I hope to show that this analysis and synthesis offer a powerful model (...) for understanding the dynamics of becoming a self, and is instructive as to the epistemic status of our various philosophical and theological projects. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Kearney's call for an ethical imagination from a specifically Levinasian perspective. I begin by reviewing Kearney's proposal, querying the structure of his ethical imagination. I then give a brief sketch of Levinas's thought with special attention to his theme of le tiers, and the necessary passage from ethics to the politics of justice. I will argue that Kearny's diacritical method exemplifies an appropriate approach to the said, the region of justice, history, and politics, while suggesting (...) that Levinas offers Kearney a more radical anthropology than can be found in Ricoeur. My wager is that a basic tension that manifests in Kearney's determination of the ethical imagination may ideally correlate to the aporetic passage from ethics to politics in Levinas such that they exhibit a specific complementarity. I conclude by exploring the problems and promises of my argument and the motives for my thesis. (shrink)

Levinas’s so-called ‘Eurocentric’ statements still remain a source of puzzlement. In this article, I reconstruct his own account of what it means to be disinterested, focusing on what I call motivational purity, and justified context transcendence. I then perform an immanent critique of his position. I demonstrate 1) if taken on its own terms, Levinas’s account of is self-defeating; 2) the will and concept in fact show up in Levinas’s positive description of ethical selfhood, such that his account of is (...) ultimately question-begging. I conclude by drawing out the consequences these internal problems hold for both Levinas’s chauvinist statements and his overall philosophy. (shrink)

Levinas's big idea is that our lived sense of moral obligation occurs in an immediate experience of the otherness of the Other, and that moral meaning is grounded in alterity rather than identity. Yet he also held what seemed an inconsiderate, or 'eurocentric,' view of other cultural traditions. In Saying Peace, Jack Marsh explores this problem, testing the coherence and adequacy of Levinas's central philosophical claims. Using a twofold method of reconstruction and critique, Marsh conducts a holistic immanent evaluation of (...) Levinas's major works, showing how the problem of eurocentrism, and abiding ambiguities in Levinas's political and religious thought, can be traced back to specific problems in his general philosophical methodology. Marsh offers an original analysis of Levinas's method that verifies and extends existing critical work by Jacques Derrida, Robert Bernasconi, Judith Butler, and others. This is the first book to foreground the normative question of chauvinism in Levinas's work, and the first to perform a holistic critical diagnosis of his general philosophical method. (shrink)

This paper argues that the existence of a canon of established and privileged texts in the primary literacy curriculum in England can be traced historically and has informed current national policy and practice. This canonisation of a particular set of literature has served to marginalise popular cultural and media texts, often the preferred texts of children in contemporary society. The paper examines the historical development of an established, hegemonic body of texts and critically analyses current national curricula frameworks for primary (...) literacy in order to determine the way in which reading material is framed. It is argued that current national policy enshrines particular textual traditions at the expense of more popular forms of material and that this has major implications for the relevance of the future primary literacy curriculum. (shrink)

‘Difficult questions’: singularity and particularity in Cohen and Levinas Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-9 DOI 10.1007/s11007-011-9205-6 Authors Jack Marsh, American University of Kuwait, Salmiya, Kuwait Journal Continental Philosophy Review Online ISSN 1573-1103 Print ISSN 1387-2842.