scholarly journals Existentialism and Ecstasy: Colin Wilson’s Phenomenological Account of Peak Experiences

PhaenEx ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-85
Author(s):  
Biagio Gerard Tassone
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Peak Experiences ◽  
Transcendental Reduction ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Empirical Basis ◽  
Phenomenological Account ◽  
Ontological Categories ◽  
Ontological Ground

This paper critically examines the philosophical foundations of Colin Wilson’s New Existentialism. I will show how Wilson’s writings promoted a phenomenological strategy for understanding states of ecstatic affirmation within so-called ‘peak experiences’. Wilson subsequently attempted to use the life affirming insights bestowed by peak states to establish an ontological ground for values to serve as a foundation for his New Existentialism. Because of its psychological focus however, I argue that Wilson’s New Existentialism contains an ambivalent framework for establishing ontological categories, which leads his thought into theoretical difficulties. More precisely, Wilson’s strategy runs into problems in coherently integrating its explicitly psychological interpretation of Husserl’s theory of intentionality within a broader, and philosophically coherent, phenomenological framework. Wilson’s psychological reading of Husserl’s transcendental reduction, for example, manifests tensions in how it reconciles the empirical basis of acts of transcendence with an essentialist conception of the self as a transcendental ego. The above tensions, I argue, ultimately render the New Existentialism susceptible to criticism from a Husserlian-transcendental perspective. After outlining a Husserlian critique of Wilson’s position, I end the paper by suggesting how some of the central insights of the New Existentialism might help to bridge the gap that persists between pure phenomenological description and metaphysics.

NIETSCHE'S CONTRIBUTION TO A PHENOMENOLOGY OF INTOXICATION

2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-43
Author(s):  
Sonia Sikka
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Authorial Voice

AbstractThrough a reading of Nietzsche's texts, primarily of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this article develops a phenomenological description of the variety of intoxication exemplified in conditions of drunkenness, or in states of emotional excess. It treats Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a literary expression of such intoxication, arguing against attempts to find a coherent narrative structure and clear authorial voice behind this text's apparent disorder. Having isolated the intoxicated characteristics of Thus Spoke Zarathustra - its hyperbolic rhetoric and emotions, its lack of balance, its injustice, its shifting and conflicting moods, and its self-contradictions - I then offer an interpretation of the work, and by extension of intoxication itself, in terms of Nietzsche's model of the self as a dynamic multiplicity of forces. At the same time, I argue for a multiple and dynamic conception of personality in general.

scholarly journals La fenomenología de la depresión como modificación de la experiencia del propio self: Opacidad corporal, desincronización temporal y culpa / The Phenomenology of Depression as a Modification of the Own Experience of the Self: Body Opacity, Temporal Desynchronization and Guiltiness

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Martínez Lucena
Keyword(s):  
Phenomenological Research ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Melancholic Depression ◽  
Body Experience ◽  
Time Experience ◽  
Patient’S Experience ◽  
The One ◽  
Illness And Disease

ABSTRACTLast years, phenomenology has demonstrated its own value in the field of medicine with useful distinctions as the one among illness and disease. It has also contributed to psychiatry. Some inter-disciplinary works about mental illnesses can be found. The phenomenological description of the melancholic depression patient has three main features: a) the transformation of his own body experience; b) a continuous feeling of guilt; and c) a time experience which is desynchronized from the otherness. This paper aims to synthetize this phenomenological research about depression, which has been considered one of the plagues of our time. Moreover, it tries to explain how these changes in the patient’s experience can imply certain modifications of his own self-experience.RESUMENEn los últimos años la fenomenología ha demostrado su valía en el campo de la medicina con útiles distinciones como la hecha entre conceptos como illness y disease. También ha hecho interesantes aportaciones en el campo de la psiquiatría donde se pueden encontrar trabajos interdisciplinarios sobre la diversas enfermedades mentales. La descripción fenomenológica de la experiencia del enfermo de depresión melancólica constaría de tres elementos fundamentales: a) la transformación de la experiencia del propio cuerpo; b) el continuo sentimiento de culpa; y c) una experiencia del tiempo desincronizada con respecto a la alteridad. Esta comunicación intenta aportar una síntesis de dicha investigación fenomenológica hecha sobre la depresión, que ha sido considerada la plaga de nuestro tiempo. Además, intenta explicar en qué sentido tales elementos de la descripción fenomenológica de la experiencia del paciente de melancolía pueden implicar ciertas modificaciones de la experiencia que éste hace de su propio self.

scholarly journals Philosophical Foundations for Democracy: A Ukrainian Perspective

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-24
Author(s):  
Yuriy Myelkov ◽  
Anatoliy Tolstoukhov
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Transition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
The Subject

The article intends to conduct a philosophical analysis of democracy as it is presented by democratization processes in societies under globalization. Turbulent political life or contemporary Ukraine with its recent ‘revolution’ provides an excellent example of such a process. The authors demonstrate that the processes in question could be denoted as rather manipulation and political technologies than democratic transition. They argue that democracy can only be understood correctly as the self-organization of society composed of free and conscious human personalities. They show that personality as the subject of democracy, opposed to crowds led by contemporary demagogues, is the only possibility to achieve real changes for a better society.

Pädagogisierung und Selftracking

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Bonn
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Multidimensional Analysis ◽  
Expert Interviews ◽  
Analysis Model ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
Empirical Basis

Self-tracking and educational ambitions both strive to change people. Using a multidimensional analysis model of pedagogical communication (cf. Kade, 2004), this study identifies self-tracking as a context for (self-) pedagogization. The empirical basis is formed by semi-structured expert interviews with users and through the process of document analyses. Insights gained show the importance of the self-observation of users and their relationship to self-tracking instruments. Within these relationships, the situational interweaving of personal and external expectations as well as the handling of individually significant information about past performances and future possibilities play a central role.

The Problem of the Empirical Basis

1995 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 45-74
Author(s):  
E. G. Zahar
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Theory ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
Empirical Basis ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
Scientific Hypothesis ◽  
Main Motive ◽  
Phenomenological Account

In this paper I shall venture into an area with which I am not very familiar and in which I feel far from confident; namely into phenomenology. My main motive is not to get away from standard, boring, methodological questions like those of induction and demarcation; but the conviction that a phenomenological account of the empirical basis forms a necessary complement to Popper's falsificationism. According to the latter, a scientific theory is a synthetic and universal, hence unverifiable proposition. In fact, in order to be technologically useful, a scientific hypothesis must refer to future states-of-affairs; it ought therefore to remain unverified. But in order to be empirical, a theory must bear some kind of relation to factual statements. According to Popper, such a relation can only be one of potential conflict. Thus a theory T will be termed scientific if and only if T is logically incompatible with a so-called basic statement b, where b is both empirically verifiable and empirically falsifiable. (We shall see that neither the verifiability nor the falsifiability of b was meant, by Popper, in any literal sense.) In other words: T is scientific if it entails ¬b; where b, hence also ¬b, is an empirically decidable proposition.

scholarly journals Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience in Organizational Research: Functional and Nonfunctional Approaches

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 299-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Bagozzi ◽  
Nick Lee
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Organizational Research ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Viable Approach ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Development Methods

Neuroscience offers a unique opportunity to elucidate the role of mental phenomena, including consciousness. However the place of such phenomena in explanations of human behavior is controversial. For example, consciousness has been construed in varied and conflicting forms, making it difficult to represent it in meaningful ways without committing researchers to one species of consciousness or another, with vastly different implications for hypothesis development, methods of study, and interpretation of findings. We explore the conceptual foundations of different explications of consciousness and consider alternative ways for studying its role in research. In the end, although no approach is flawless or dominates all others in every way, we are convinced that any viable approach must take into account, if not privilege, the self in the sense of representing the subjective, first-person process of self as observer and knower of one’s own actions and history, and the feelings and meanings attached to these. The most promising frameworks in this regard are likely to be some variant of nonreductive monism, or perhaps a kind of naturalistic dualism that remains yet to be developed coherently.

scholarly journals VOLODYMYR VINNICHENKO IN THE DISCOURSE OF FRENCH MODERNISM

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-270
Author(s):  
G. Syvachenko
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
Public Responsibility ◽  
The Aesthetic

The article explores the works of the famous Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko in the context of French literature of the first half of the twentieth century, and modernist trends in particular. The Ukrainian writer, philosopher, and public figure arrived in France in the mid-1920s to live there for almost three decades. He was interested in French literature, corresponded with A. France, A. Gide, co-translated with his wife his own works into French. His late-1940s translation of the novel Nova Zapovid (The New Commandment ) marked his engagement with the French literary process. The novel was awarded a prize by a literary clubs, and demonstrated resemblance to the major trends in French modernism. The article focuses on defining the typological correspondences in the interpretation by Vynnychenko and M. Proust of such components as subjective consciousness, mixed impressionism, memoir discourse. The author’s attention has been turned towards the specifics of the typological similarity of Vynnychenko and A. Gide’s aesthetic views, their assertion of the ideas of individualism, the quest for harmonization of the self, and symbolic “artistry.” Vynnychenko’s works are also analyzed in the context of French existentialism, including the study of such typological similarities of the aesthetic and philosophical views of the Ukrainian writer and A. Camus as undisguised moralizing, a claim to be perceived as teachers of life in solving practical ethical problems of the human condition. The author examines the methods and aesthetic constructions of such concepts of existentialism as freedom, choice, death, anxiety, relationships between the self and the Other in the works of Vynnychenko, J.P. Sartre, and S. de Beauvoir. The correlation between the works of Vynnychenko and A. de Saint-Exupéry is separately studied within the paradigm of existentialism, including “honesty with oneself” and honesty with others; the idea of community and the instinct of public responsibility. The critical optics of research combines the historical specificity of the development of French modernism, its philosophical foundations, the ethnic identity of the Ukrainian writer, and the inherent incorporation of his poetics into the paradigm of French modernism. For researchers, teachers, students of philology and those interested in V. Vynnychenko’s oeuvres and problems of literary modernism.

The Mirror in-between Picture and Mind

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Göran Sonesson
Keyword(s):  
Positive Result ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
Empirical Approach ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Mental Images ◽  
Research Traditions

AbstractThe claim of cognitive semiotics to offer something new to semiotics rests on the ambition to bring together the research traditions of semiotics and cognitive science. Our focus has been on using the empirical approach of cognitive science in investigating semiotic issues. At the same time, however, phenomenological description plays a major part in preparing the studies and integrating their results, which is what is offered here. Eco has claimed that the mirror is not a sign, but once the notion of sign is specified, the mirror image is seen to be a perfect instance of it. It is no accident that the Gallup test, which is supposed to demonstrate the emergence of the self, starts having a positive result concurrently with the picture understanding. In contrast, mental images are not images and thus not signs. They are presentifications, i.e., a means for making something present, in the sense characterized by Husserl, and by such followers as Marbach and Thompson. We however argue that Husserl’s model of picture consciousness is incomplete, and that Thompson’s study of mental images lacks clarity because of the absence of any real comparison to pictures.

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