The idea of applying biomimicry to cities is attracting increasing attention as a way of achieving sustainability. Undoubtedly the most frequently evoked natural model in this context is the forest, though it has not yet been investigated with any great scientific rigour. To overcome this lacuna, we provide: first, a justification of the model of the forest via what we call the arguments from “fittingness”, “scale”, and “complexity”; second, an exploration of various key innovations made possible by this model in (...) the fields of urban planning, urban water systems, urban energy and transport systems, and urban food and nutrient systems. (shrink)

ABSTRACTStudies examining the interpretation that is given to if–then statementstypically use what are referred to as basic conditionals, which give contextless relations between two unrelated concrete terms. However, there is some evidence that basic conditionals require a more abstract form of representation. In order to examine this, we presented participants with truth-table tasks involving either basic conditionals or conditionals referring to imaginary categories, and standard conditional inference tasks with abstract and familiar premises. As expected, fewer typical defective conditional interpretations were (...) given to basic conditionals. In addition, partial correlations showed a unique relationship between the interpretation of basic conditionals and abstract inferential reasoning. Results suggest that people process basic conditionals as a form of abstract reasoning, and that the interpretation of conditionals... (shrink)

I illustrate the use of decision-theory and game-theory in the social sciences by means of examples from Gauthier, Tversky and Kahneman, and Bouldon.

This chapter ventures into a deeper interpretation of the concept of cogito, ergo sum. The chapter begins with a presentation of the newly-reborn challenge and contact of Descartes' thoughts to contemporary philosophy. One such contact was Henry's use of “material phenomenology” to interpret Descartes' hermeneutic. The chapter emphasizes that this particular line gives access to an original and powerful understanding of the cogito, ergo sum, and not only that its phenomenological repetition pulls the Cartesian ego out of the aporias (...) for which the greatest interpreters—Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger—had opposed it, but above all that this line opens absolutely new perspectives on the whole of Descartes' work. In particular, the chapter argues that it would in this way seem possible to reestablish, in the “I think, therefore I am” which generosity finally effects, the unity long missing between the love of wisdom and the search for truth. (shrink)

English summary: This volume contains essays on some of the foremost thinkers on phenomenology, the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. French description: Dans le triptyque, ouvert par Reduction et donation. Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phenomenologie, assure dans Etant donne. Essai d'une phenomenologie de la donation et complete avec De Surcroit. Etudes sur les phenomenes satures, nous avons procede assez globalement pour qu'on nous permette ici de rassembler apres-coup certains des travaux (...) qui l'ont prepare et qui ont pris une importance renforcee lorsqu'il se fut agi de prolonger la phenomenalite de la donation par la description du phenomene erotique (Le phenomene erotique) ou de l'appliquer hermeneutiquement a une oeuvre theologique (Au lieu de soi. L'approche de saint Augustin). Ainsi reconnaitra-t-on ici des recherches historiques sur le depassement de l'horizon de l'objectite du phenomene impose par la notion, necessaire mais d'abord incomprise, de donation, ou Husserl et Heidegger ont repris et enfin aborde de front ce qui, pour tous les neo-kantiens, restait une pierre d'achoppement. Puis on trouvera deux moments d'une discussion avec Emmanuel Levinas, commencee des L'idole et la distance et les Prolegomenes a la charite mais restee en suspens, sur la legitimite de recourir a l'amour comme a un concept. Deux autres debats furent aussi essentiels, tant Henry et Derrida ont conduit plus avant dans la comprehension des questions de l'invisibilite phenomenale et de l'impossibilite comme une ouverture. Enfin les trois dernieres etudes, en discussion serree avec tous, fixent l'acces au soi par autrui, l'emergence du tiers comme second autrui accomplissant l'evasion hors de soi, et a la fin l'irreductible par excellence, celui que toute reduction atteste negativement. (shrink)

Along with Husserl's Ideas and Heidegger's Being and Time, Being Given is one of the classic works of phenomenology in the twentieth century. Through readings of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and twentieth-century French phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Henry), it ventures a bold and decisive reappraisal of phenomenology and its possibilities. Its author's most original work to date, the book pushes phenomenology to its limits in an attempt to redefine and recover the phenomenological ideal, which the author argues has (...) never been realized in any of the historical phenomenologies. Against Husserl's reduction to consciousness and Heidegger's reduction to Dasein, the author proposes a third reduction to givenness, wherein phenomena appear unconditionally and show themselves from themselves at their own initiative. Being Given is the clearest, most systematic response to questions that have occupied its author for the better part of two decades. The book articulates a powerful set of concepts that should provoke new research in philosophy, religion, and art, as well as at the intersection of these disciplines. Some of the significant issues it treats include the phenomenological definition of the phenomenon, the redefinition of the gift in terms not of economy but of givenness, the nature of saturated phenomena, and the question “Who comes after the subject?” Throughout his consideration of these issues, the author carefully notes their significance for the increasingly popular fields of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Being Given is therefore indispensable reading for anyone interested in the question of the relation between the phenomenological and the theological in Marion and emergent French phenomenology. (shrink)

In the third book in the trilogy that includes Reduction and Givenness and Being Given. Marion renews his argument for a phenomenology of givenness, with penetrating analyses of the phenomena of event, idol, flesh, and icon. Turning explicitly to hermeneutical dimensions of the debate, Marion masterfully draws together issues emerging from his close reading of Descartes and Pascal, Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas and Henry. Concluding with a revised version of his response to Derrida, In the Name: How to Avoid (...) Speaking of It, Marion powerfully re-articulates the theological possibilities of phenomenology. (shrink)

I trace the origin of the socialist slogans back to their biblical roots through the French Utopian socialists.

This article, published originally in French just after the 1989 release of Jean-Luc Marion’s book Reduction and Givenness, consists of a sustained critical study of the manner in which Marion advances from the basic principles of phenomenology. Henry outlines briefly three principles, “so much appearance, so much being,” “the principle of principles” of Ideas I, “to the things themselves!” before entering into a lengthy dialogue with Marion’s proposal of a fourth principle: “so much reduction, so much givenness.” Henry (...) submits each principle to critique, highlighting that they contain confusing premises. Henry is appreciative of Marion’s capacity to root the appearing of phenomena in givenness, but he ultimately finds problematic the gap between the call and response that is a fundamental structure of Marion’s fourth principle. Henry, in contrast, develops his own theme of pure givenness, expressed in the form of subjectivity he calls auto-affection, in the final pages of the article. (shrink)

Due to his innatist theory, James of Viterbo brings original answers to a number of late-thirteenth century questions concerning cognition. While he maintains a certain distinction between the soul and its faculties, and among these faculties, he rejects the Aristotelian distinction between agent and patient intellects. Thanks to its predispositions to knowing, the mind is able to be an agent for itself. Correlatively, James rejects the usual conception of abstraction. Neither does the intellect act on the phantasms, nor the phantasms (...) on the intellect. The intellect simply actualizes a conceptual scheme at the occasion of adequate sensory representations. Since the innate predispositions are the intrinsic principles of cognitive acts, James maintains with Giles of Rome the notion of intelligible species. But he agrees with Godfrey of Fontaines that an act of intellection is nothing else than the fully actualized species itself. He also concedes to Henry of Ghent that the form of an intelligible object need not be ontologically received in the intellect, but can just have an “objective” presence. Finally, thanks again to his theory of predispositions, he has an easy solution to the vexed problems of the knowledge of substance essences and of the self. (shrink)

I interpret Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” in terms of his contemporaneous lectures on Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. I uncover several connections and similarities between the two works, which make possible a new reading of the artwork essay: namely, as an “ontodicy.” This term of Jean-Luc Nancy’s denotes the readiness with which Heidegger’s thinking on Being may be used to justify evil. I argue that Nancy’s term may be applied legitimately to the artwork (...) essay also, i.e., that it can be read as a silent justification of evil. (shrink)

I interpret Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” in terms of his contemporaneous lectures on Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. I uncover several connections and similarities between the two works, which make possible a new reading of the artwork essay: namely, as an “ontodicy.” This term of Jean-Luc Nancy’s denotes the readiness with which Heidegger’s thinking on Being may be used to justify evil. I argue that Nancy’s term may be applied legitimately to the artwork (...) essay also, i.e., that it can be read as a silent justification of evil. (shrink)

Presque vingt ans après sa parution, Etant donné (Puf, 1997) a, au-delà des premiers débats, imposé la question du donné et de la donation. Etant donné. Reprise reprend et prolonge ces nouvelles interrogations. D'abord la question de la réduction : définit-elle vraiment le principe dernier de la phénoménologie? Si tel était le cas, la formule " autant de réduction, autant de donation " peut-elle se justifier (en discussion avec la critique de Michel Henry)? Ensuite, la reconnaissance du donné comme (...) instance première et dernière de la phénoménalité peut-elle encore faire droit à l'herméneutique (en discussion avec Hans-Georg Gadamer)? Dans ce cas, comment se déplie le pli de la donation avec la manifestation? Et encore, le monde peut-il se manifester comme l'un des phénomènes donnés, et même comme la totalité du donné? Ou ne faut-il pas lui reconnaître une donation par exception, celle de la possibilité de toute donation (sur la ligne de Jan Patocka)? Enfin, la reprise du phénomène à partir de la donation n'impose-t-elle pas de substituer décidément au modèle de l'objet, constitué à l'identique et pour lui, celui de l'événement, qui surgit à partir de soi seul, sans cause ni a priori (en faisant droit à Claude Romano)? (shrink)

According to the Dominican Thomas of Sutton (ca. 1250–1315), the reception of intelligible species in the potential intellect is in every point similar to the actualization of forms in matter, which means that the potential intellect remains completely passive through the whole process of concept acquisition. However, Sutton adds that when the intelligible species are stored in the memory and aggregate in logically organized clusters, thus becoming intellectual habitus, they have a way of being that is not found in material (...) things, namely, incomplete actuality. Without being properly speaking efficient causes of mental processes, they spontaneously tend to emerge by themselves into the light of awareness—even though other elements (other intelligible species, notably, or the will) may in fact block them. This special sort of self-actualization is compatible, Sutton thinks, with the passivity he ascribes to the potential intellect. (shrink)

When read alongside the great command of Deuteronomy, ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength,’ the Judeo-Christian directive to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is perhaps one of the most theologically and ethically charged phrases in the Bible. In these two mutually reliant commandments lies a meeting point between the divine and the human that has important implications for our understanding of the nexus between theological conceptions of love and philosophical engagement with worldly existence. This (...) point of intersection is explored in a particularly unique way in the thinking of Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Nancy. In this article, I conduct the first sustained comparative analysis of their respective philosophies, using an exploration of the role of love and affectivity in their work to better understand the philosophical opportunity represented by the commandment to love God and neighbour. (shrink)

Este trabajo estudia los desarrollos de M. Henry y J.-L. Marion a propósito de los principios de la fenomenología, su número y su función. Para ello revisa los argumentos que llevan a replantear su vinculación y sostienen la propuesta de estos autores de elevar su número. Finalmente, analiza la máxima “a las cosas mismas”, como quintaesencia fenomenológica, a los efectos de relevar las claves que ofrece para el planteamiento de una fenomenología de lo inaparente y su consecuente ampliación del (...) entorno de fenómenos aludidos. (shrink)

This essay examines how Michel Henry's and Jean‐Luc Marion's continuation of phenomenology's turn to the invisible relates to painting, aesthetics, and theology. First, it discusses Henry and Marion's redefinition of phenomenality. Second, it explores Henry's “Kandinskian” description of abstract painting as expressing “Life.” Third, it explicates Marion's “Rothkoian” rehabilitation of the idol and renewed zeal for the icon—both phenomena exemplify “givenness.” Fourth, it unpacks my thesis: Henry's phenomenology, theologically applied, exercises an inadequate Kantian apophasis, characterized by (...) a sublime sacrifice of the imagination; although Marion's work sometimes evidences a similar tendency, its prevailing momentum offers theology a fully catholic scope. (shrink)

Der transzendentalen Subjektivität als sinngebender Instanz liegt in der Husserlschen Phänomenologie ein fundamentaler, der Reflexion nicht zugänglicher Bewusstseinsbereich zugrunde: die absolute Subjektivität.Das basale Defizit der epistemisch ausgerichteten Phänomenologie Husserls ist die Unmöglichkeit einer unmittelbaren Selbstreferenzialität in Bezug auf das eigene Selbst-Bewusstsein. Ausgehend von einem ersten Zugang zur Präreflexivität bei Sartre wird auf Grundlage eines radikalisierten phänomenologischen Designs Michel Henrys und Jean-Luc Marions die Struktur dieser basalen Bewusstseinssphäre systematisch entwickelt.

Aesthetics is a central topic in the works of Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry. While Henry focuses on abstract art (especially Kandinsky), Marion’s writings range over the history of art, including analyses of Courbet, Rothko, and Klee. This article examines their strikingly similar aesthetic theories and shows how they are grounded in a phenomenological claim about the relation between invisible and visible, hence about phenomenality itself. The artist becomes a paradigm for phenomenological receptivity in both thinkers, and art (...) is assigned a quasi-salvific function. This raises several important questions about their theories of art. (shrink)

To address the theological turn in phenomenology, this paper sets out critical arguments opposing the theist phenomenology of Michel Henry and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the event. Henry’s phenomenology has been overlooked in recent commentaries compared with, for example, Jean-Luc Marion’s work. It will be shown here that Henry’s philosophy presents a detailed novel turn in phenomenology structured according to critical moves against positions developed from Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This demonstration is done through a strong contrast (...) with Deleuze and a short engagement with Quentin Meillassoux. The paper presents an argument against the theological turn on the grounds that it misunderstands the form of affectivity when compared to Deleuze’s work on affect and event. It will be argued that Henry’s search for a free-standing affect deduced as a condition for any appearance underplays the way any affect is included in many causal and transcendentally determined series such that any notion of the pure affect independent of other processes is a fiction. The loss of this pure affect entails the questioning of the theological turn in Henry. (shrink)

This essay responds to the Nancean account of presentation, evoked in the opening citation, in order to trace out in Nancy's enquiries a disruption of Husserlian presentation, and a re-thinking of materiality on the edge of classical phenomenology. It stages a non-encounter between the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and of Jacques Derrida in relation to a third term, the Lacanian conception of the ‘real’. Thereby it can be shown how these writings touch on each other, in response to phenomenology and (...) to psychoanalytical theory, but do not engage. All the same, the claim to be made is that the writings of Nancy and Derrida converge in forming a third option, alongside the secularised phenomenologies of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and the Christian phenomenologies of Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry, by marking up the event of Lacan's reformulation of Freud's psychoanalytical theorising. (shrink)

La correlación intencional de la conciencia con el mundo es el tema central de la fenomenología. Edmund Husserl ha intentado fundar esta correlación a partir de la explicitación de un curso vital previo de carácter pasivo que se orienta teleológicamente hacia actividades intencionales. En esta misma tarea, Michel Henry ha acentuado el polo de la inmanencia de la correlación, fundando la intencionalidad de la conciencia en la vida carnal afectiva. Por su parte, Jean-Luc Marion ha enfatizado el polo de (...) la trascendencia de la correlación y ha descentrado la intencionalidad de la conciencia, atendiendo a la saturación de los fenómenos. En este trabajo nos proponemos recorrer sucintamente los tres caminos señalados en búsqueda del proto-fenómeno originario de la experiencia, intentando contrastar las propuestas y vislumbrar eventuales convergencias. (shrink)

This book explores the threshold between phenomenology and lived religion in dialogue with three French luminaries: Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Yves Lacoste. Through close reading and critical analysis each chapter touches on how a liturgical and ritual setting or a spiritual vision of the body can shape and ultimately structure the experience of an individual's surrounding world. The volume advances debate about the scope and limits of the phenomenological analysis of religious themes and disturbs the assumption that theology (...) and phenomenology are incapable of constructive interdisciplinary dialogue. (shrink)

This book is an introduction to French phenomenology in the post-1945 period. While many of phenomenology's greatest thinkers--Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty--wrote before this period, Steven DeLay introduces and assesses the creative and important turn phenomenology took after these figures. He presents a clear and rigorous introduction to the work of relatively unfamiliar and underexplored philosophers, including Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Luc Marion and others. After an introduction setting out the crucial Husserlian and Heideggerian background to French (...) phenomenology, DeLay explores Emmanuel Levinas's ethics as first philosophy, Henry's material phenomenology, Marion's phenomenology of givenness, Lacoste's phenomenology of liturgical man, Chrétien's phenomenology of the call, Claude Romano's evential hermeneutics, and Emmanuel Falque's phenomenology of the borderlands. Starting with the reception of Husserl and Heidegger in France, DeLay explains how this phenomenological thought challenges boundaries between philosophy and theology. Taking stock of its promise in light of the legacy it has transformed, DeLay concludes with a summary of the field's relevance to theology and analytic philosophy, and indicates what the future holds for phenomenology. Phenomenology in France: A Philosophical and Theological Introduction is an excellent resource for all students and scholars of phenomenology and continental philosophy, and will also be useful to those in related disciplines such as theology, literature, and French studies. (shrink)

La phénoménologie, après avoir dénoncé avec Husserl et Heidegger le contresens fatal qui aurait conduit Descartes à ne voir dans l’ego qu’une simple et banale « chose » pensante, conçue sur le modèle et à l’imitation de la choséité spatio-temporelle – celle qui caractérise la res extensa – s’est vite ravisée : Levinas réhabilite la dignité phénoménologique de la « res cogitans » ; Henry fait du sentir originel et soustrait à l’ekstase de la représentation le mode le plus (...) fondamental de la subjectivité vivante ; Marion réintroduit le moment de la chair sentante au cœur de la démarche métaphysique. L’article présente et discute ces différentes interprétations. (shrink)

In this paper I consider Ricœur’s negotiation of the boundary or relationship between philosophy and religion in light of the larger debate in contemporary French philosophy. I suggest that contrasting his way of dealing with the intersection of the two discourses to that of two other French thinkers (Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry) illuminates his stance more fully. I begin with a brief outline of Ricœur’s claims about the distinction or relation between the discourses, then reflect on those of (...) Marion and Henry, who although they do not relate them in the same way still together form a significant contrast to Ricœur’s perspective, and conclude with a fuller consideration of Ricœur’s methodology in light of this comparison. I suggest that it is in particular his hermeneutic commitments that lead him both to more rigorous distinctions between discourses and ironically to greater mediation. (shrink)

François Laruelle's system of non-standard philosophy and its univocal radical immanence is highly indebted to Henry's non-representationalism. Admittedly, in contrast to Laruelle's "heretical" Christology, Henry's theological-realist determination is astricted by the idealist paralogisms of a cogitativist Ego, which transpires most markedly in Henry's account of Faith-after all, Henry is a Jesuit phenomenologist following in the tradition of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chretien. Nonetheless, Henry's work on immanence, deanthropocentrized and universalized as generic, takes us much further (...) than both Spinoza's speculative immanence, which is diluted by the necessitarian world of negative determination, and Deleuzian immanence, which is characterized by multiplicitous difference. In The Michel Henry Reader, editors Scott Davidson and Frédéric Seyler weave together a comprehensive anthology of essays that survey Henry's phenomenology of life, stitching together an oeuvre than spans Marxist political philosophy, phenomenology of language, subjectivity and aesthetics, and ethics qua religion. Rather than analyzing specific objects and phenomena, phenomenology is tasked with disclosing the structural manifestation and conditioned appearance of objects. Drawing primarily from Husserl and, consequently, Heidegger, Henry examines a kind of "pure phenomenology" that, contra intentionality and the inert world of visible objects, examines affectivity's "radical invisibility". Whereas Husserl and Heidegger's analyses emphasize the self-transcending nature of appearances, for Henry appearance is never independent or self-reliant but, instead, genitive and denotative. (shrink)

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity (...) of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

Mitigation—preventative actions to reduce the human forcing of climate change with the goal of keeping climate change within a range to which humans can adapt—must be prompt, rigorous, and focused on eliminating emissions of carbon dioxide, beginning with rapid cessation of the use of coal. Carbon dioxide is by far the most threatening greenhouse gas because it remains in the atmosphere for millennia longer than any other major greenhouse gas, and the heat retained on the planet by atmospheric carbon dioxide (...) will continue to emerge from its transitional storage in the deep oceans for millennia after the atmospheric carbon finally dissipates. Sustainable development can be increased and ocean acidification can be stopped only if the dominant fossil fuel regime is promptly replaced by an affordable and accessible alternative energy regime. Poorer countries cannot be reasonably expected to cooperate with vigorous mitigation unless they are assisted with necessary adaptation. (shrink)