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In contrast to Anglophone debates on personal identity initially formed by John Locke’s investigation of personal identity in the sense of personal continuity or persistence through time, the Continental tradition focuses on what constitutes ipseity (ipseite, Selbstsein, selfhood) in the sense of individuality or uniqueness of the human being “constituted” by its continuous transformation through changing experience. In this study, I claim that contemporary phenomenological research in France—especially the “phenomenology of the event” as represented by Henri Maldiney and Claude Romano—contributes to this Continental discussion in a significant way: it formulates the conditions of personal uniqueness or distinctiveness with regard to other persons, conditions not to be found in Heidegger’s existential conception of selfhood in Being and Time. More precisely, Maldiney and Romano allow us to answer the principal questions of this study: In what does the personal uniqueness consist? What exactly individualizes the first-person selfhood disclosed in Dasein’s relation to death? In my three-stage analysis, I first deal with Heidegger’s conception of selfhood in Being and Time and its limits with respect to the question of personal uniqueness. Next, I analyse Maldiney’s conception of “eventful selfhood” in which he “completes” Heidegger’s conception of selfhood by describing Dasein’s openness to ontical, and yet fully authentic events. Finally, I develop the argumentation by presenting Romano’s even more radical conception of the “happening subjectivity” (advenant), which allows us to return to the second major feature of personal identity: personal persistence. Nonetheless, I conclude that the connection between personal uniqueness and persistence is not sufficiently examined in the phenomenology of the event, which opens the path towards another related inquiry into the following problem: What is the proper subjective dimension or the “underlying thing” (ὑποκeίμeνον) in the background of personal persistence which somehow resists events?

Apart from being a pervasive concept of present-day law, human dignity is a phenomenon regularly experienced by people in their lives. Yet before any protection for it can be advanced, it is imperative that an explanation of how human dignity is at all possible be established, including a description of its constitutive figures. Paul Ricoeur made a significant contribution to the lacking phenomenology of human dignity. Despite only rarely using the term dignity directly, he identified and described its three constitutive and interdependent figures—self-esteem, self-respect, and recognition—and embedded them amongst such notions as self, identity, narrative, passivity, bodiliness, fragility, morality, and law. He activated the phenomenological, existentialist, and hermeneutic legacies in understanding human dignity and succeeded in modifying certain sharp-edged structures that have periodically been associated with the notion of human dignity. In this paper I argue that human dignity is a high-ranking topic in Ricoeur’s writings, identify and synthesize the phenomenology of human dignity scattered throughout his works, and reveal the profound existential aspects he attributed to it. Finally, I discuss and evaluate his phenomenological-existentialistic account of human dignity, particularly taking into consideration the contemporary use of human dignity in law and its associated discourses.

This paper uses an ongoing ethnography of childhood rehabilitation to rethink the Heideggerian phenomenology of death. We argue that Heidegger’s threefold perishing/death/dying framework offers a fruitful way to chart how young people, their parents, and practitioners address mortality in the routine management of muscular dystrophies. Heidegger’s almost exclusive focus on being-towards-death as an individualizing existential structure, rather than the social life with and around death, is at odds with the clinical experience we explore in this paper. After looking to the basic structures of Heidegger’s philosophy of death, we point to recent work by Leder, Svenaeus, Aho, and Carel, bringing health and the spaces of healthcare into our purview. Turning to ethnographic data, we argue that a revised phenomenology of death gives a nuanced account of how health care practitioners address death, dying, and perishing, and outline some steps toward a more ontologically sensitive clinical space. These revisions are in line with recent work in disability studies, that see disability as more than a death sentence. We advocate adjusting phenomenological reflections on disability, to be framed as a way of life, rather than as a deficient or especially deadly mode of human existence.

Despite the recent increase of interest in the work of Merleau-Ponty there is still a persistent tendency to overlook the uniqueness of the philosophical position he advances in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article I present a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the phenomenological reduction that explains how it is original. I do this by contrasting his presentation of the reduction with that of the early Husserl, highlighting how his emphasis on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’ leads him to reject Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as a ‘philosophical science,’ and the Kantian language in which the this account is framed. I go on to critically discuss the interpretations of the reduction advanced by Stephen Priest and Joel Smith as examples of readings that fail to fully grasp Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘natural attitude’ as resting on the inherent objectivizing structure that is built into perception itself. The way that these authors misinterpret Merleau-Ponty helps to make maximally clear the profound philosophical significance that he places on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’.

This paper deals with the question of historical facticity in the phenomenological tradition. I argue that taking historicity into consideration in its factical constitution means transgressing the realm of the primordial or existential temporality. Following Ricoeur’s discussion of the idea of the “referential status of the past,” the question of the material foundation of historical meaning-formation, i.e., relation between temporality and materiality will be brought into the forefront of phenomenological investigations. It is with this context in mind that I argue that exploring the conditions of historicity with regard to its factical and material determinations should assume a realist position in phenomenology.

The purpose of the article is to present the outlines of the reception and the influence of Heidegger’s philosophy on the territory of former Yugoslavia. This reception and influence were in their essence co-conditioned by specific political, social and cultural circumstances in the region, which were throughout accompanied by “the syndrome of dehumanization”. The confrontation with Heidegger’s philosophy is therefore co-defined by the profoundly experienced crisis of European humanity. During both world wars the attempt of an overcoming of this crisis of humanity by the means of phenomenological and existentialist philosophy was the main focus of attention. The period after the Second World War is denoted by the linking of Marxism with Heidegger’s attempt to surpass philosophy as metaphysics through the perspective of the history of being; in this context we specifically discuss the Praxis philosophical school and the original philosophical thought of Vanja Sutlic. During the disintegration of Yugoslavia and in the period thereafter, besides the intensive appropriation of Heidegger’s thought through translations and interpretations, which also led to the thorough study of Slavic philosophical terminologies, post-Heideggerian ways of thinking came to the fore, together with the possibility for a new humanization within the wider European and global social framework.

In several of his research manuscripts from the 1930s, Edmund Husserl considers the concrete life-world to be a world essentially determined by both humans and animals, or a “humanized” and “animalized” world. Husserl bases this claim on two observations. First, in his view, the surrounding objects of the human world are as such marked by cultural practices. Second, he considers that there is a corresponding animal world that similarly bears the existential traces of the animal. The following paper attempts to lay bare the various forms of interplay between these two processes, as they come to the fore in several analyses, especially in Husserl’s reflections on pets. Although Husserl’s treatment of this issue remains rather unilateral and elliptic, the paper attempts to draw from his reflections several consequences that might also be relevant for current debates in animal ethics.

There are many ways of interpreting the behaviours related to substance misuse and addiction, which can be sort out as three basic models: biomedical, legal, and social. They are corresponding to approaches built in different epistemic and professional frameworks, such as medicine, law, and social work. Confronted with the experience of addiction, these models appear as pre-determined by a specific scientific or professional ideology; they presuppose a pre-understanding of the phenomena. I directed, therefore, my investigation on those phenomenological paths that might lead to, and circumscribe the experience of addiction and I propose an analytical framework based on three major phenomenological perspectives: descriptive, genetic, and inter-relational. This paper argues in favour of defining addiction without making reference to a form of failure, psycho-somatic or existential. On the contrary, it concludes that there is a need to adopt a definition of addiction which holds at its core the idea of empowering addicted persons, of re-constructing their capacity to take decisions about their own lives.

The paper presents the prevailing understanding of pre-reflective and reflective experience as a “data-description model”. According to this model, pre-reflective experience is the original datum, the meaning of which is fully determined in the very beginning, whereas reflection is a secondary layer that purports to recover faithfully the meaning of the pre-reflective. The paper spells out the difficulty of this model by looking into the scepticism on reflection. Despite its contribution to explicating the basic level of human consciousness, the data-description model merely attends to the epistemological function of reflection and its orientation towards the past. The aim of the paper is thus to propose an alternative model inspired by the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition, especially the paradigm of “text” Gadamer and Ricoeur emphasize. By understanding pre-reflective experience as a text, we are able to make explicit the essential role reflection plays for human life and its inherent existential dimension.

Increasing attention to existentialist thought by criminologists and other social scientists in recent decades has created an opportunity to envision new possibilities in critical theoretic inquiry that extend well beyond the classical formulations of this tradition. In this essay, I draw on existentialist ideas to outline a critical perspective rooted in recent developments associated with Ulrich Beck’s notion of “risk society” and the related theory of reflexive modernization. I argue that, though the detraditionalization consequences of reflexive modernization give greater scope to agency in the risk society, transcendence in the existentialist sense is found in the hermeneutic reflexivity one experiences in high risk practices I call “edgework”. Finally, I explore several options for using existential transcendence in hermeneutic reflexivity as a reference for critical analysis and, in doing so, suggest an alternative to Beck’s own critical approach—cosmopolitanism—as a foundation for a critical theory of the second modern social order.

As a domain of philosophical enquiry that examines what it means to be, existentialism is a moral project that is centered on the self. While a few have applied the precepts of existentialism to the philosophical implications of homicide offenders, one question that has been overlooked in previous literature is ‘what is the offspring attempting to do by killing his/her parent(s)’? Using historical work on nineteenth century parricides in America, this paper examines parricide as an identity project.

Foucault is typically seen as having rebelled against the previous generation of French philosophy, which was dominated by existential phenomenology, and by Sartre in particular. However, the relationship between these two generations and between these two philosophers is more complex than one of simple opposition. Through a refracted focus on Foucault’s late work on Greco-Roman philosophy and on the themes of the practice of the care of the self and the freedom associated with that practice, I argue that Foucault—whose philosophy is centered around the problematization of site-specific processes of subjectification— is closer to existentialism than he seems.

Ernest Becker’s work addresses the implications that arise from being aware of our own mortality. Like Sartre, Becker recognises that human beings have the potential to transcend and look beyond their immediate situation, but his work also confronts the darker aspects of human existence that arise from our selfawareness. The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of Becker’s work and to show the potential of Becker’s theory of evil to inform a number of contemporary debates in the social sciences. Although Becker’s work directly examines why human beings can act so inhumanly towards one another, his theory is not altogether pessimistic. The paper concludes by arguing that Becker’s theory intended to create new possibilities for living in more creative and humane world.

The debate in relation to the soul suffers nowadays from a great lack of clarity. At least part of this cloudiness stems from a confusion among three different viewpoints that are not always reconcilable or mutually intelligible: the scientific point of view (natural sciences and empirical psychology), the therapeutic point of view (especially psychoanalysis) and the philosophical point of view. The goal of this paper is to blow away a little this cloudiness, and to introduce into the discussion a view that has not yet received its proper place in it: existentialism. The scientific approach investigates the soul as if it were an object in the world, a fact. This approach gives priority to objective observations over subjective ones, and steps in the direction of materialization of the soul (the soul becomes the mind and the mind becomes the brain). Transcendental philosophy and psychological therapies explain the relation between the subject and its objects, and by this reveal the subjective dimension of our reality as the ground not only for our objective knowledge but for our ethical life as well. Existentialism, I suggest, makes a further and important step in this direction by focusing on individualistic aspects of human existence, which science could not know and general theories of the subject do not see.

Many years ago, the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel made a helpful distinction between a ‘‘problem’’ and a ‘‘mystery.’’ Schematically, a problem is a situation with respect to which the person is a detached observer. One identifies a problem, solves it, and moves on. There is no fundamental alteration of the self in solving a problem, no calling of the self into question. In contrast, a mystery is a situation within which the person him/herself is involved. Immersion within a mystery makes detachment impossible. Indeed, a mystery is never ‘‘solved’’ in the way that a problem can be. One can never simply walk away from it the way one can with a problem, even from problems that show themselves to be insoluble, for a problem, however important, remains objectified from the person’s standpoint. Conversely, one may struggle for a lifetime to come to terms with a mystery, to fathom where one stands with respect to it. Transformative Phenomenology is a book about mysteries. It consists of a dozen individual, empirically-grounded studies and a helpful theoretical introduction by the editors, Valerie Bentz and David Rehorick. Each of the studies reports on a significant extended experience—in most cases encompassing a period of years— whose importance and power continues for the author. Insofar as a particular method of systematic reflection grounded primarily in Husserlian eidetic variation and Alfred Schutz’s theorizing of typification and relevance is brought to bear in the effort to understand these experiences, the studies reported here are phenomenological. Insofar as the experiences under question are mysteries, they are transformative. At first glance, perhaps, there is nothing unexpected in this claim. ‘‘Phenomenology is inherently transformative,’’ we are told by Bentz and Rehorick (p. 26). That something transformational takes place in the knower’s understanding of the intentional object, the noema, is an apodictic certainty of the phenomenological

Nietzsche tells a story in The Birth of Tragedy of King Midas’s capture of Silenus, the wise companion of Dionysus. While in his clutches, King Midas insisted to hear from Silenus ‘‘what was best and most desirable of all things for man.’’ After resisting for a while, Silenus asked ‘‘why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is— to die soon’’ (Nietzsche 1992, s. 3). Nietzsche explains that Silenus’s claim is part of the folk wisdom of the Ancient Greeks. He says, ‘‘The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence’’ (Nietzsche 1992, s. 3). We are vulnerable, we suffer, we die, and at crucial stages of our lives, our survival requires the good will of others on whom we are dependent. These are the facts of our finitude as embodied creatures. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche describes how the Greeks developed their particular forms of religion and art as a response to the horror of this finitude. The profound need to avoid this horror was the ‘‘impulse to call art into being, as the complement and consummation of existence, seducing one to a continuation of life’’ in spite of Silenus’s wisdom that what is best is never to have been born (Nietzsche 1992, s. 3). Nietzsche’s account is part of a tradition of philosophers who have developed responses to the experience of finitude. Phenomenologists in particular have played a prominent role in this tradition. For Heidegger the experience of finitude is to be met with a kind of resoluteness. More recently, working in the tradition of virtue ethics inspired by Aristotle, Martha Nussbaum argues that our essential vulnerability is an existential condition for leading the good life (Nussbaum 1986). The development of virtues necessary for human flourishing is often dependent upon luck. In order to flourish as a human being, one must be fortunate enough to have

Theorizing has been conceived historically in illuminative and ocular metaphors, and as an activity that occurs in a fixed and privileged relation to political society that permits a panoramic perspective. These elements of light, sight, and distance, are supportable existentially and ethically in post-war, post-Holocaust world. One of the first to explore the challenges to theorizing in this era was Albert Camus. He provided phenomenological and existential investigations of the obstacles to theorizing politics in his literary works, particularly his trilogy of novels: The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall. In this paper, I offer a reading of these novels that isolates theorizing as an activity performed not from a transcendent perceptual vantage of perfect light and vision, but from the immanent perspectives achieved in the city, among friends, or by exile.

The essay discusses the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel’s theorizing about the individual. Whereas it is typically within the context of the modern metropolis and the mature money economy that Simmel’s ideas have been discussed in the secondary literature, I render those ideas in another light by addressing the ontological and existential issues crucial to his conception of the individual. In Simmel, the individual is divided between the “what” and the “who,” between the qualities which make one something individual and one’s non-repeatable and finite existence which makes one someone singular. I argue that whereas the first dimension can be understood sociologically, in terms of social relations, the latter is not accessible to sociology as such, but must be treated philosophically. Therefore, if we wish to address this duality that lies at the heart of individuality, a “philosophical turn” for sociology is called for.

From time to time we find ourselves in a political and social crisis or situation that forces us to recall great insights that were once a part of our intellectual landscape. These great insights were articulated by prophetic voices that for whatever reason have been prematurely returned to our bookshelves to collect dust. This unfortunate fate befell Herbert Marcuse, who enjoyed a brief moment in the intellectual spotlight during the 1960s and 1970s. Recently there has been a renewed interest in Marcuse’s work. This new volume of Marcuse’s writings edited by Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss is an important contribution to the revival of Marcuse studies. The essays in this volume covers a 40 year range of Marcuse’s work, from 1932 to 1972. This forty year period captures the early Marcuse—under the influence of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger—attempting to develop a post World War I social theory of Western industrial society. We see Marcuse’s program develop through his later engagement with Freud. This volume takes us up to Marcuse’s post-1968 reflections on nature and liberation. The essays are divided into three parts: political critique; Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis; and philosophical critique. In this review I will attempt to organize and discuss these essays under what I take to be their common theme. It is a theme that permeates all of Marcuse’s works, regardless of the wide range of topics that he covers and the multiplicity of influences from which he draws. It is not uncommon to hear Marcuse’s readers complain about his work being somewhat inconsistent. Indeed, Marcuse has been accused of mood swings. For example, Eros and Civilization is often read as an optimistic work, while One-Dimensional Man is read as more pessimistic. This way of characterizing

This is an existential-phenomenological reading of Max Weber’s “Class, Status, Party” that seeks a fuller understanding of meaning accomplishment in a stratified World. I appropriate stratification as a single meaning structure ontically defined by domination, intersubjectivity, and life-chances and ontologically determined by the power-to-be (Seinkonnen), There-being-with-others (Mitdasein), and potentiality (Moglichkeit). I then discuss the significance of these structures in finite transcendence (There-being, Dasein) and describe ways they factually unfold in World achievement. I conclude with logotherapeutic reflections concerning meaning accomplishment in a stratified World and a summary of key questions facing existential-phenomenology in light of the likelihood that There-being must embrace, indeed, live, the inherent equality of Being (Gleichheit des Seins) among Daseins to accomplish its authenticity.

In a journal entry from 1906, Husserl complains of lacking “internal stability” and of his desire to “achieve” it. My claim in this paper is that the “phenomenological method,” which he made public in his 1907 lectures Die Idee der Phanomenologie was, and is, a means to achieve the inner harmony that Husserl longed for. I do not provide an analysis of why Husserl might have felt the way he did; my aim is to show what internal stability might be and how one might achieve it. I conclude that the phenomenological method is the means, the “how,” to internal stability, which I characterize as “clarity” and “harmony” regarding our beliefs and, and ultimately, our authentic comportment.

In this paper I establish an alliance between the thought of Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference. In light of Fanon's critique of Sartre's characterization of the place of the Negritude movement in terms of dialectic, I point to the inherent limitations of modern humanism's dialectical accounts for enabling genuine historical change. Alternatively, I appeal to Deleuze's distinction between history and becoming, and his concomitant idea of intensive becoming-revolutionary. I conclude that such an alliance with Deleuzian metaphysics holds far greater promises for effecting Fanon's revolutionary project of the creation of a new humanity (and therefore, of a new ethics and a new politics) than his traditional assimilation to Phenomenology and Existentialism.

This reflection focuses on lived experience with the Technological Other (Quasi-Other) while pursuing creative video and film activities. In the last decade work in the video and film industries has been transformed through digital manipulation and enhancement brought about by increasingly sophisticated computer technologies. The rules of the craft have not changed but the relationship the artist/editor experiences with these new digital tools has brought about increasingly interesting existential experiences in the creative process. How might this new way of being with technology change the craft and the crafter? Through a phenomenological understanding of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Don Ihde, and their contributions to the human-technology conversation, this essay moves to reveal the lived experiences of artists/editors who use computers to create by means of film and digital video formats. Exploring notions of lived space, lived body, lived time, and lived relation through the computer interface allows for digging deeper into inhabiting technology and experiencing the Technological Other.

As a practicing physician (psychiatrist), scientist (neurologist) and philosopher, Erwin Straus developed a body of writing which, falling within the phenomenological tradition, is highly original and insightful. His unusual combination of work from these three areas constitutes one of the most important attempts to provide what has been called “a new Paideia.” Regarding this unique blend of perspectives and concerns as quite natural, he conceived his work variously as a “medical anthropologyrdquo; or “phenomenological psychology.” In the end, he was both a pioneer and a rebel: starting from psychiatry, he proceeded boldly straight into phenomenological philosophy, illuminating significant aspects of human life: if we would understand the “norm,” we must begin with the disruptions, as failures of existential projects; that is, as forms of human life - which was ultimately at the heart of his life-long epistemic and therapeutic concerns.

Thomas Flynn's work on Sartre and Foucault, the first of a two-volume project, offers a unique opportunity for examining an existential theory of history. It occasions rethinking existential-social categories from the vantage point of the poststructuralist turn. And it contributes to developing existential variants of critical theory. The following questions guide me in each of the three above areas. First, how is human history intelligible, given not only our finite sense of ourselves but also claims that we have reached the end of history? Second, with the poststructuralist eclipse of dialectics, can we render existential categories in social terms and vice versa? Third, critics decry grand theorizing even in fallibilist reason, e.g., of Habermas, while others are worried by the normative deficits of poststructuralist nominalism, e.g., of Foucault. Can existential variants of critical social theory, anticipated before Sartre by Marcuse, split the difference?

The purpose of this lecture is to celebrate the memory of Aron Gurwitsch by examining and enlarging the domain of phenomenological clarification of some elements of what Gurwitsch called the ’’logic of reality.‘‘ Chief among those elements are the nature of the taken-for-grantedness of our existential belief, the difference between presentive and non-presentive indices of reality and the ground for the self-illumination of the ’’world of working.‘‘

In the first part of the paper, I try to clarify the cluster of moods and questions we refer to generically as the problem of the meaning of life. I propose that the question of meaning emerges when we perform a spontaneous transcendental reduction on the phenomenon ‘my life,’ a reduction that leaves us confronting an unjustified and unjustifiable curiosity. In Part 2, I turn to the film ikiru, Kurosawa's masterpiece of 1952, for an existentialist resolution of the problem.

Recent Continental European philosophy has converged on the rejection of the subject, or more broadly of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Though this rejection is most commonly associated with French Post-structuralism, it is equally important in Habermas' work. Habermas disagrees with French views on humanism, rationality and the enlightenment, but he joins them in their opposition to what he calls the philosophy of consciousness. A recent anthology by a group of French thinkers (Cadava, Connor and Nancy, 1991) bears the title: Who ComesAfier the Subject? 1 suggesting that the battle against the subject has been fought and won, the opponent vanquished for good. Where, its editors seem to ask, do we go from here? What exactly is the metaphysics of the subject, that is so resoundingly rejected by such diverse thinkers? It is generally portrayed as nothing less than the entire mainstream of modem philosophy, beginning with Descartes and culminating in its most extreme form in phenomenology and existentialism. It is centered in such notions as the cogito, the 'I think,' consciousness, self-consciousness, self-transparency, self-determination. In spite of its dominance, this tradition is thought to have been gradually undermined in the course of our century when philosophers began to take seriously some powerful ideas from outside the philosophical mainstream, notably those of false consciousness (Marx) the unconscious (Freud) and structuralist conceptions of language. By themselves, however, these extra-philosophical intrusions would not have been enough to bring on the full-scale repudiation of the mainstream tradition. Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, among others, have made valiant attempts to intergrate them into the mainstream. What was decisive, I think, in combination with the influences already mentioned, was the work of the * A version of this paper was delivered as The Aaron Gurwitsch Memorial Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in New