Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

2019 ◽  
pp. 234-247
Author(s):  
René Rosfort
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Hermeneutical Phenomenology ◽  
Phenomenological Psychopathology ◽  
The Way

The aims of phenomenology are to clarify, describe, and make sense of the structures and dynamics of pre-reflective human experience, whereas hermeneutics aims to articulate the reflective character of human experience as it manifests in language and other forms of creative signs. This suggests that the two approaches differ in aims, methods, and subject matter. A closer look at the two disciplines reveals, however, that in terms of history, themes, and philosophical goals they have more in common than that which separates them. This chapter examines these differences and common features in the philosophy of Heidegger and Gadamer, then demonstrates how Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology provides us with a dialectical account of personal identity that can contribute to phenomenological psychopathology. The combination of a phenomenological clarification of selfhood and a hermeneutical emphasis on interpretation paves the way for an interdisciplinary approach to mental illness.

The Patient as an Autonomous Person

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Stanghellini ◽  
René Rosfort
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Ethical Principle ◽  
The Other ◽  
Major Aspect ◽  
Hermeneutical Phenomenology ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
The Way

Treating the other as an autonomous person is widely considered a guiding ethical principle. The notions of autonomy and personhood are, however, far from evident in a time of striding naturalism. Hermeneutical phenomenology provides an explanation of these notions, and argues that personhood is not merely an ethical principle, but an integral part of vulnerability to mental illness. In other words, ethics and questions of norms and values are not merely a bioethical add-on to psychiatry, but an integral part of what it means to do psychiatry. Being a person is to be faced with the constant task of becoming who I am through the otherness that constitutes my life as a person. Otherness challenges my life from without (e.g., the way other people understand and treat me) and from within (e.g., my body, habits, and dispositions). Although a major aspect of personal identity is constituted by otherness, a person is able, nevertheless, to change her habits, think about her dispositions, and reconsider her actions. This ability to relate ourselves to what and who we are is constitutive of personhood and of the fragility that makes each of us the person that we are.

Emotion

2018 ◽  
pp. 305-315
Author(s):  
René Rosfort
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Structures ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Biological Approach ◽  
Human Emotions ◽  
Phenomenological Psychopathology ◽  
The Way

Emotion plays a fundamental role in mental illness. A central part of understanding mental illness is to make sense of the fragile character of human emotional life. Emotion research has long been divided into a biological approach and cognitive approach, arguing that the nature of human emotions is to be found in either our specific human cognition or in our cross-species biology. In fact, although human emotions are indeed characterized by intentionality and cognitive structures, many human emotional phenomena, for example, our feelings and moods, are non-intentional and cognitively impenetrable. Phenomenological psychopathology can help to clarify this interplay without renouncing either the biology or the rationality of human emotions. It offers a phenomenology of human experience that allows us to make sense of how emotions feel combined with a hermeneutics of the existential significance of our emotions, that is, what they are and why we feel the way we do.

Prescriptive Power: Biologism, Biopsychiatry and Drug-centred Psychopharmacology

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 291-309
Author(s):  
Francis Russell
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Biological Ontology ◽  
Health Discourse

This paper looks to make a contribution to the critical project of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, by elucidating her account of ‘drug-centred’ psychiatry, and its relation to critical and cultural theory. Moncrieff's ‘drug-centred’ approach to psychiatry challenges the dominant view of mental illness, and psychopharmacology, as necessitating a strictly biological ontology. Against the mainstream view that mental illnesses have biological causes, and that medications like ‘anti-depressants’ target specific biological abnormalities, Moncrieff looks to connect pharmacotherapy for mental illness to human experience, and to issues of social justice and emancipation. However, Moncrieff's project is complicated by her framing of psychopharmacological politics in classical Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness. Accordingly, she articulates a political project that would open up psychiatry to the subjugated knowledge of mental health sufferers, whilst also characterising those sufferers as beholden to ideology, and as being effectively without knowledge. Accordingly, in order to contribute to Moncrieff's project, and to help introduce her work to a broader humanities readership, this paper elucidates her account of ‘drug-centred psychiatry’, whilst also connecting her critique of biopsychiatry to notions of biologism, biopolitics, and bio-citizenship. This is done in order to re-describe the subject of mental health discourse, so as to better reveal their capacities and agency. As a result, this paper contends that, once reframed, Moncrieff's work helps us to see value in attending to human experience when considering pharmacotherapy for mental illness.

Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” to First-Year Students

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Grogan
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
Teaching Poetry ◽  
Approach To Teaching ◽  
The University ◽  
The Way

This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems—Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues”—in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students’ observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in relation to it. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I tentatively suggest that canonical Western and contemporary postcolonial poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. I further posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into initially “less relevant” yet ultimately rewarding poems, while remaining important objects of study in themselves.

Why Phenomenology?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Present Approach ◽  
The Self ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Pure Intuition ◽  
The Way

This chapter sets out the rationale for adopting a phenomenological approach to the devout life literature. Distinguishing the present approach from versions of the phenomenology of religion dominant in mid-twentieth-century approaches to religion, an alternative model is found in Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul. These illustrate that alongside its striving to achieve a maximally pure intuition of its subject matter, phenomenology will also be necessarily interpretative and existential. Although phenomenology is limited to what shows itself and therefore cannot pass judgement on the existence of God, it can deal with God insofar as God appears within the activity and passivity of human existence. From Hegel onward, it has also shown itself open to seeing the self as twofold and thus more than a simple subjective agent, opening the way to an understanding of the self as essentially spiritual.

Unstoppable Decay and Relentless Hope: Study of Alterity in Popular Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 56-76
Author(s):  
Adrien Ordonneau
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Consequences of capitalism’s crises and their manifestations in arts have deeply modified the way we can approach mental health. As Mark Fisher pointed out in 2009 with his book Capitalist Realism, neoliberalism is using mental illness as a way to keep existing. The capacity to think a way out of alienation is deeply linked with arts and popular culture. The article proposes to study the uncanny dialogue between arts and politics in relationships to people, and mental health. The theoretical framework will show how arts are trying to build a way out of alienation, since 2009. The article will illustrate this research with the study of many artistic practices, including our own. The findings will show how the ambiguous and uncanny relationships with the world is used by artists as a way out of alienation, despite the difficulties occurring with mental health in time of crisis.

Mental Health Ontologies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janna Hastings
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
The Public ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
Public Health Challenges ◽  
Health Related ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Way

Mental health presents one of the defining public health challenges of our time. Proponents of different conceptions of what mental illness is wage war for the hearts and minds of patients, practitioners, policy-makers, and the public. Debate and fragmentation around the nature of the entities that feature in the mental health domain divide resources and reduce progress. The way mental health is publicly discussed in the media has tangible effects, in terms of stigma, access to healthcare and resources, and private expectations of recovery. This book explores in detail the sorts of statements that are made about mental health in the media and public reporting of scientific research, grounding them in the wider context of the theoretical frameworks, assumptions and metaphors that they draw from. The author shows how a holistic understanding of the way that different aspects of mental illness are interrelated can be developed from evidence-based interpretation of the latest research findings. She offers some ideas about corrective, integrative approaches to discussing mental health-related matters publicly that may reduce the opposition between conceptualisations while still aiming to reduce stigma, shame and blame. In particular, she emphasises that discourse in the media needs to be anchored to an overview of all the research results across the field and argues that this could be achieved using new technological infrastructures. The author provides an integrative account of what mental health is, together with an improved understanding of the factors driving the persistence of oppositional accounts in the public discourse. The book will be of benefit to researchers, practitioners and students in the domain of mental health.

scholarly journals The Ethical Experience of Nature: Aristotle and the Roots of Ecological Phenomenology

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dylan B. Van der Schyff
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Deep Ecology ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Environmental Challenges ◽  
Moral Meaning ◽  
Ethical Experience ◽  
The Way

I demonstrate here how Aristotle's teleological conception of nature has been largely misunderstood in the scientific age and I consider what his view might offer us with regard to the environmental challenges we face in the 21st century. I suggest that in terms of coming to an ethical understanding of the creatures and things that constitute the ecosystem, Aristotle offers a welcome alternative to the rather instrumental conception of the natural world and low estimation of subjective experience our contemporary techno-scientific culture espouses. Among other things, I consider how his conception of orexis and eudaimonia (happiness or, as I prefer here, "the flourishing life") might be extended to include the eco-system itself, thus allowing us to better understand the moral meaning of nature. I conclude with a look at the way in which modern phenomenology re-addresses the fundamental Greek concern with ontology, meaning and human authenticity. I consider the ways in which phenomenology reasserts the value of direct human experience that was so important to Aristotle; and I consider how this view, and that of Deep ecology, may help us to experience nature - and all of Being for that matter - in a more authentic, meaningful and altogether ethical light.

scholarly journals Personal Identity: The Simple and Complex Views Revisited

Disputatio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (52) ◽  
pp. 9-22
Author(s):  
Harold Noonan
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Clear Sense ◽  
Reasonable Possibility ◽  
Time Fall ◽  
Recent Account ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Way

Abstract Eric Olson has argued, startlingly, that no coherent account can be giv- en of the distinction made in the personal identity literature between ‘complex views’ and ‘simple views’. ‘We tell our students,’ he writes, ‘that accounts of personal identity over time fall into [these] two broad categories’. But ‘it is impossible to characterize this distinction in any satisfactory way. The debate has been systematically misdescribed’. I argue, first, that, for all Olson has said, a recent account by Noonan provides the coherent characterization he claims impossible. If so we have not been wrong all along in the way he says in what we have been telling our students. I then give an account of the distinction between the reductionist and non-reductionist positions which makes it differ- ent from the complex/simple distinction. The aim is to make clear sense of the notion of a not simple but non-reductionist position — which seems an eminently reasonable possibility and something it may also be useful to tell our students about.

The Palingenesis of De rerum natura

1994 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 81-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Schiesaro
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

1. If I had to sum up as concisely as I possibly can the subject matter of this paper, I would probably say that it was originally stimulated by the attempt to understand how Lucretius articulated his didactic plot. What is the plot of a poem that presents itself as analysing nothing less than ‘the nature of things’? It is safe to assume as a starting-point that a didactic poem which intends to revolutionize each and every principle of perception and evaluation of reality cannot remain unaffected by the theoretical views it tries to prove, and that the persuasive impact of those theories on the reader will inevitably be strengthened or weakened by the way the text situates itself in respect to those theories: the poem itself will be the most effective or the most damning example of its own theories.

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