Consciousness, phenomenology of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanne Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Natural Event ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The World ◽  
Phenomenological Account

Phenomenology is an approach to consciousness that originates at the beginning of the twentieth century in the work of Edmund Husserl. A phenomenological account of consciousness begins from a first-person reflection on consciousness that puts out of play our everyday or natural-scientific preconceptions about consciousness and the world and describes the structural features of our consciousness of the world. This project is carried on in the phenomenological works of authors such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, albeit with sometimes quite different emphases and aims. Insofar as phenomenology describes the structures of consciousness by virtue of which there is a world for us, phenomenology is a form of transcendental philosophy. Specifically, phenomenologists describe how the structures of intentionality, self-awareness, temporality, attention, embodiment, and intersubjectivity make possible our consciousness of worldly things, situations, and events. According to them, the world is not just an objective nature comprised of spatiotemporally extended and causally connected things; it is also always an intersubjectively accessible world that is shot through with values and organized in light of practical projects, due to which the world appears with a significance that is variable across time and space. Husserl maintains that phenomenological descriptions of the essential structures of consciousness that make possible the experience and knowledge of the world—that is, of transcendental consciousness—can also be taken as psychological descriptions of consciousness conceived as a natural event in the world. In this way, a number of contemporary philosophers draw on specific descriptive insights from the phenomenological tradition to address issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and drive the empirical investigation of consciousness forward (such as Gallagher and Schmicking 2010; Dahlstrom et al. 2015; Petitot et al. 1999; Thompson 2007; Zahavi and Gallagher 2012; Zahavi 2012). Alternatively, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty explicitly draw on insights from psychology and psychopathology to inform their phenomenology of consciousness, which is a strategy that has also been employed by some contemporary phenomenologists (see Zahavi 2000).

Pilsēta Jāņa Hvoinska dzejā

2021 ◽  
pp. 233-242
Author(s):  
Anda Kuduma
Keyword(s):  
Concept Formation ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The World ◽  
Depth Dimension ◽  
Symbolic Images ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
The City

The article is dedicated to the evaluation of creative work by poet and translator Jānis Hvoinskis, and it characterises the content and artistic qualities of Hvoinskis’s poetry process. The main focus is on the representation of the phenomenon of the city as an essential and characteristic poetic chronotope segment in Hvoinskis’s poetry. The study aims to identify and assess the characteristic kinds of city concept formation and their importance in building Hvoinskis’s artistic style. The article highlights and evaluates the techniques for designing the artistic structure of the indivisible chronotope in Hvoinskis’s poetry. This view is based on the fundamental principles of phenomenology, i.e., an individual phenomenon (phainómeno) is crucial in the reflection of consciousness, inner temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and lifeworld. In turn, the highlight of poetry subject’s primary condition and existential motifs is logically linked to the main ideas of existentialism in their attitude towards the reason of an individual’s existence, relationships to life and death, freedom of will and choice, determinism. The study’s theoretical and methodological basis includes the ideas of phenomenology theoreticians (Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others) and the theories of existentialism philosophers (Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre). Hvoinskis’s poetry allows us to speak about a city as a concept, i.e., as a universal and capacious generalising notion (which includes images, notions, symbols) from which its associative components – poetry themes, motifs, images – derive. Thus, it is possible to speak about the depth dimension of the city phenomenon. The city phenomenon in Hvoinskis’s poetry is the landscape that has been adopted as the centre of the world of the lyric subject in both poetry collections that have come out to date: “Lietus pār kanālu e” (Rain over the Channel e, 2009) and “Mūza no pilsētas N” (Muse from City N, 2019). The depth dimension in Hvoinskis’s poetry appears in the natural synthesis of mythical and real chronotope, associatively impressive and plastic imagery, expressive style kindred to surrealism poetics. The city appears as a modernism project created by the logic of industrialisation, simultaneously revealing a metaphysical dimension where symbolic images as constituents of a myth preserve the memory of wholeness of the world. The emotional atmosphere of Hvoinskis’s poetry is defined by the highly existential atmosphere – despite the harsh indifference created by the city, the sadness of existential loneliness, social distance, and aversion towards life, the poet makes the tragic and ugly strangely appealing without losing the feeling of lightness and hope. The poet’s intense intuition and imagination exhibit the congeniality with the 20th-century French modernists. Hvoinskis’s poetry muse is death, which implies life.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Howells
Keyword(s):  
Collective Choice ◽  
Personal History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Dialectical Reason ◽  
History Of ◽  
Phenomenological Account ◽  
Material Conditions

Sartre was a philosopher of paradox: an existentialist who attempted a reconciliation with Marxism, a theorist of freedom who explored the notion of predestination. From the mid-1930s to the late-1940s, Sartre was in his ‘classical’ period. He explored the history of theories of imagination leading up to that of Husserl, and developed his own phenomenological account of imagination as the key to the freedom of consciousness. He analysed human emotions, arguing that emotion is a freely chosen mode of relationship to the outside world. In his major philosophical work, L’Être et le Néant(Being and Nothingness) (1943a), Sartre distinguished between consciousness and all other beings: consciousness is always at least tacitly conscious of itself, hence it is essentially ‘for itself’ (pour-soi) – free, mobile and spontaneous. Everything else, lacking this self-consciousness, is just what it is ‘in-itself’ (en-soi); it is ‘solid’ and lacks freedom. Consciousness is always engaged in the world of which it is conscious, and in relationships with other consciousnesses. These relationships are conflictual: they involve a battle to maintain the position of subject and to make the other into an object. This battle is inescapable. Although Sartre was indeed a philosopher of freedom, his conception of freedom is often misunderstood. Already in Being and Nothingness human freedom operates against a background of facticity and situation. My facticity is all the facts about myself which cannot be changed – my age, sex, class of origin, race and so on; my situation may be modified, but it still constitutes the starting point for change and roots consciousness firmly in the world. Freedom is not idealized by Sartre; it is always within a given set of circumstances, after a particular past, and against the expectations of both myself and others that I make my free choices. My personal history conditions the range of my options. From the 1950s onwards Sartre became increasingly politicized and was drawn to attempt a reconciliation between existentialism and Marxism. This was the aim of the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) (1960) which recognized more fully than before the effect of historical and material conditions on individual and collective choice. An attempt to explore this interplay in action underlies both his biography of Flaubert and his own autobiography.

Being-In-Itself Revisited

Dialogue ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Correct Description ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The World ◽  
The Moment

In the Introduction to Being and Nothingness, entitled “The Pursuit of Being”, Jean-Paul Sartre states that Edmund Husserl has misunderstood his own essential discovery of the intentionality of consciousness and that “from the moment that he makes of the noema an unreal, a correlate of the noesis, a noema whose esse is percipi, he is totally unfaithful to his principle”. In what follows I assess this claim as I explicate Sartre's development of the concept of intentionality and the basis for his claim. In addition, I show how an understanding of the views of both Husserl and Sartre reveals a basic convergence. My primary purpose in this is to further develop the correct description of the objects of the world through an analysis and elucidation of the accounts of Sartre and Husserl.

scholarly journals INTERSUBJEKTYVAUS KŪNO FENOMENOLOGIJA: PRISILIETIMO PATIRTIS

Problemos ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Dalius Jonkus
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Font Size ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Traditional Conception ◽  
Living Body ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The World ◽  
Body Self ◽  
Sense Of Touch

Straipsnis analizuoja Edmundo Husserlio, Jeano-Paulo Sartre’o ir Maurise Merleau-Ponty požiūrį į kūno vaidmenį intersubjektyviuose santykiuose. Jeanas-Paulas Sartre’as atmeta dvigubų jutimų sampratą. Jis neigia galimybę patirti kūną kaip subjektą ir objektą vienu metu. Sartre’as akcentuoja, kad kitas vizualiai pažįstamas tik jį paverčiant objektu. Edmundas Husserlis ir Maurise Merleau-Ponty ieško sąryšio su kitu kūniškumo plotmėje. Atrasdami prisilietimo grįžtamąjį ryšį su savimi, o vėliau išplėtodami šią kvazirefleksijos sampratą ir kitų juslių lygmeniu, Husserlis ir Merleau-Ponty sugriauna tradicinę sąmonės ir savasties sampratą. Sąmonė nebegali būti suprantama kaip vidujybė, o kūnas kaip išorybė. Pats kūnas atrandamas kaip susidvejinęs – patiriantis kitą ir save tuo pat metu. Suskyla ir savasties substanciškumas. Savastis visada pasirodo kitame, kitam ir per kitą. Kartu pasikeičia ir santykio su kitu traktuotė. Kitas nėra kažkoks transcendentiškas objektas, kurį reikia pažinti ar užvaldyti. Santykis su kitu atsiskleidžia kartu kaip santykis su savimi ir santykis su pasauliu. Jei mano kūnas nėra vien mano kūnas, bet jis yra tarp manęs ir kitų, tai tada galime suvokti, kodėl aš negaliu savęs sutapatinti su vieta, kurioje esu. Ir mano vieta, kaip ir mano kūnas, yra mano tiktai kitų atžvilgiu. Mano savastį iš esmės apibrėžia šis tarpkūniškumas, kurio patirtis sudaro sąlygas ne tik įsisąmoninti savąjį socialumą, bet ir suvokti savosios būties tarp – pasauliškumą. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: fenomenologija, intersubjektyvumas, kitas, gyvenamas kūnas, tarpkūniškumas, savipatirtis.   Phenomenology of Intersubjective Body: the Experience of TouchDalius Jonku  Summary The article deals with the conception of intersubjective body in Edmund Husserl’s, Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre rejects the conception of double sense, i.e. he denies the possibility to have bodily experience as a subject and an object at the same time. He argues that we can know Other visually only as an object. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty are in search of connection with the Other on a new plane. They investigate the preconditions of the openness to the Other. Their attention is focused on the bodily self-awareness in the experience of touch. Both philosophers develop the conception of bodily quasi-reflection. They transform the traditional conception of selfhood and show its paradoxical alienation from itself. The one’s own body is revealed as insisting on the otherness. The analysis of double senses in the experience of the sense of touch reveals the experience of “my” body as an inter-corporality. That’s because both philosophers can reject the prejudice of immanence and transcendence. The experience of a living body is always a relation with “myself”, with the other and with the world. Keywords: phenomenology, intersubjectivity, interreflectivity, Other, living body, self-awareness.ibri, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;"> 

scholarly journals The Epistemic Approach to the Problem of Consciousness

2020 ◽  
pp. 481-496
Author(s):  
Daniel Stoljar
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Significant Implication ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Epistemic Approach ◽  
Minority View ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
Epistemic View

According to the epistemic view of the hard problem of consciousness, we are ignorant at least for the time being of something important and relevant when it comes to the hard problem, and this fact has a significant implication for its solution. This chapter outlines one version of the view before considering two objections. The first is that, while we may be ignorant of various features of the world, we are not ignorant of any feature that is relevant to the hard problem. The second is that, even if the epistemic approach is true, properly understood it is not an answer to the hard problem; indeed, it is no contribution to that problem at all. The chapter concludes with some brief reflections on why the epistemic approach, despite its attractiveness, remains a minority view in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Caring for the World

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 164-185
Author(s):  
Vincent Blok ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Will ◽  
The One

In the twentieth century, the concept of the will appears in bad daylight. Martin Heideg-ger for instance criticizes the will as a movement of reducing otherness to sameness, dif-ference to identity. Since his diagnosis of the will, the releasement from a wilful manner of thinking and the exploration of the possibility of non-willing has become a prevalent issue in contemporary philosophy. This article questions whether this quietism is still possible in our times, were we are confronted with climate change and the future of mankind is fundamentally threatened. On the one hand, the human will to 'master‘ and 'exploit‘ the natural world can be seen as the root of the ecological crisis, as Heidegger observed. On the other hand, its current urgency forces us to evaluate the releasement of the will in contemporary philosophy. Because also Heidegger himself attempted to develop a proper concept of the will in the onset of the thirties, we start our inquiry with Heidegger‘s phenomenology of the will in the thirties. Although Heidegger was very critical about the concept of the will later on, we are not inclined to reject the concept of the will as he did eventually. In this article we show that Heidegger's criticism of the will is not phenomenologically motivated, and we will develop a proper post-Heideggerian concept of willing. Finally the question will be answerd whether this proper concept of willing can help us to find a solution for the ecological crisis.

scholarly journals What's in a Concept? Conceptualizing the Nonconceptual in Buddhist Philosophy and Cognitive Science

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Concept Formation ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Buddhist Philosophy ◽  
Comprehensive Treatment ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

A recurrent problem in the philosophical debates over whether there is or can be nonconceptual experience or whether all experience is conceptually structured or mediated is the lack of a generally accepted account of what concepts are. Without a precise specification of what a concept is, the notion of nonconceptuality is equally ill defined. This problem cuts across contemporary philosophy and cognitive science as well as classical Indian philosophy, and it affects how we go about philosophically engaging Buddhism. Buddhist philosophers generally argue that our everyday experience of the world is conceptually constructed, whereas “nonconceptual cognition” (nirvikalpa jñāna) marks the limits of conceptuality. But what precisely do “conceptual” and “nonconceptual” mean? Consider that “concept” is routinely used to translate the Sanskrit term vikalpa; nirvikalpa is accordingly rendered as “nonconceptual.” But vikalpa has also been rendered as “imagination,” “discriminative construction,” “discursive thought,” and “discrimination.” Related terms, such as kalpanā (conceptualization/mental construction) and kalpanāpoḍha (devoid of conceptualization/mental construction), have also been rendered in various ways. Besides the question of how to translate these terms in any given Buddhist philosophical text, how should we relate them to current philosophical or cognitive scientific uses of the term “concept”? More generally, given that the relationship between the conceptual and the nonconceptual has been one of the central and recurring issues for the Buddhist philosophical tradition altogether, can Buddhist philosophy bring fresh insights to our contemporary debates about whether experience has nonconceptual content? And can contemporary philosophy and cognitive science help to illuminate or even resolve some older Buddhist philosophical controversies? A comprehensive treatment of these questions across the full range of Buddhist philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science would be impossible. I restrict my focus to certain core ideas from Abhidharma, Dharmakīrti’s apoha theory, and Yogācāra, as refracted through current philosophical and cognitive science views of concepts. I argue for the following five general theses. First, cognitive science can help us to clarify Abhidharma issues about the relation between nonconceptual sense perception and conceptual cognition. Second, we can resolve these Abhidharma issues using a model of concept formation based on reading Dharmakīrti through cognitive science glasses. Third, this model of concept formation offers a new perspective on the contemporary conceptualist versus nonconceptualist debate. Fourth, Yogācāra offers a conception of nonconceptual experience absent from this debate. In many Yogācāra texts, awareness that is said to be free from the duality of “grasper” (grāhaka) and “grasped” (grāhya) is nonconceptual. None of the contemporary philosophical arguments for nonconceptualism is adequate or suitable for explicating this unique kind of nonconceptuality. Thus, Yogācāra is relevant to what has been called the problem of the “scope of the conceptual,” that is, how the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction should be drawn. For this reason, among others, Yogācāra has something to offer philosophy of mind. Moreover, using cognitive science, we may be able to render some of the Yogācāra ideas in a new way, while in turn recasting ideas from cognitive science. Fifth, in pursuing these aims, I hope to show the value of thinking about the mind from a cross-cultural philosophical perspective. Sixth, from an enactive cognitive science perspective informed by Buddhist philosophy, a concept is not a mental entity by which an independent subject grasps or represents independent objects, but rather one aspect of a complex dynamic process in which the mind and the world are interdependent and co-emergent poles.

Fodor, Jerry Alan (1935–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Information Processing ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Philosophy Of Psychology ◽  
Internal Representations ◽  
Jerry Fodor ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

Jerry Fodor has been one of the most influential figures in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, and ‘cognitive science’ through the latter part of the twentieth century. His primary concern has been to argue (vigorously) for a certain view of the nature of thought. According to this view, thinking is information processing within ‘the language of thought’. The mind can be understood as a computer, which directs action with the aid of internal representations of the world.

scholarly journals Acquaintance

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Extensive Introduction

Bertrand Russell famously distinguished between ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance’ and ‘Knowledge by Description’. For much of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, many philosophers viewed the notion of acquaintance with suspicion, associating it with Russellian ideas that they would wish to reject. However in the past decade or two the concept has undergone a striking revival in mainstream ‘analytic’ philosophy – acquaintance is, it seems, respectable again. This is the first collection of new essays devoted to the topic of acquaintance, featuring contributions from many of the world’s leading experts in this area. The volume showcases the great variety of topics in philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of language for which philosophers are currently employing the notion of acquaintance. This book features an extensive introduction by one of the editors, which provides some historical background as well as summarising the main debates and issues in contemporary philosophy where appeals to acquaintance are currently being made. The remaining thirteen essays are grouped thematically into the following four sections: (1) Phenomenal Consciousness, (2) Perceptual Experience, (3) Reference, (4) Epistemology.

Sartre on Affectivity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Hatzimoysis
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Affective Experience ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The World ◽  
Phenomenological Account

In the Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939) Jean-Paul Sartre presents an original account of emotional phenomena. His account focuses on the phenomenology of affectivity, a topic that is taken up in a section of The Imaginary (1940), in which he explores the relation between the subjective and objective aspects of affective experience. This chapter offers a close reading of the section from The Imaginary with a view to laying out clearly its proposed analysis of feelings, and places that analysis in the context of Sartre’s theory of our conscious engagement with the world. The chapter concludes with some critical remarks about the coherence of Sartre’s phenomenological account of emotions.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document