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The article describes the complexity of Paul Gauguin’s primitivism in a philosophical, more precisely, hermeneutical-phenomenological way. Hermeneutical, because it deals with the interpretation of primitivism, and phenomenological, since it focuses on the phenomenological gaze that, in all its complexity. Primitivism, as it is argued, is a way of looking. In Gauguin's ‘Tahitian’ paintings, we encounter a double gaze: one the one hand, the colonial gaze depicts the other as primitives, but on the other hand, there is the gaze of the faces of Tahitians staring at us. I will elaborate on the latter as the counter-gaze and argue that the characterization of Gauguin as a 'primitivist' fails to understand that in his work, the other resists representation and, as such, gazes back. Gauguin’s painting as a 'anti-conquest', therefore, is not a mere personal, political or cultural revolt, but first and foremost a phenomenological effort. It is the spectator who becomes the intruder, the voyeur, caught red-handed in his own primitivist gaze.

Is travel inherently beneficial to human character? This is one of the principal questions to the practice of tourism from a philosophical viewpoint and posed as such by Dean MacCannell. But it is also a question with a long tradition. In this article, I aim to elaborate on MacCannell’s initial understandings of Stendhal’s work as a starting point for the philosophical deepening of tourism studies. MacCannell has criticised John Urry and argued for an analysis by replacing the term ‘the tourist gaze’ by ‘tourist agency’. MacCannell’s alternative version of the gaze is based on the non-representational discourse of the tourist-subject. Based on the work of the French writer Stendhal, MacCannell argues that the tourist gaze presumes a second gaze which ‘turns back onto the gazing subject an ethical responsibility for the construction of its own existence’. Although this notion makes the tourist not only a passive spectator but also an active narrator, the narration is nonetheless never a formal, ‘factual’ description of the things visited and experienced by the tourist. Instead of objectively representing the world, travel in this respect becomes a way of constructing the self.

Het labyrinth van de mythe van Sisyphus

Voorwoord 'De spiegel' in: Saxion Dalton University Press. 2014 p. 6-9.

De roep om beroeps- en bedrijfsethiek wordt steeds sterker. Maar is ethiek een vak dat je kunt onderwijzen? Is het 'leerbaar '? Hoe moet ethiek in het hbo een plaats krijgen?

In order to address this dissertation’s overarching question of what hospitality is, we study hospitality from a pragmalinguistic perspective. We specifically focus on the issue of the gap between the pragmatic message of an utterance that is expressed by means of speech acts and the linguistic forms involved to construct these acts. In this regard, we are particularly interested in the contribution of certain linguistic forms in Spanish, such as modes of address and verb moods, to the pragmatic message conveyed in hospitality situations. In daily life, speakers say ‘Come in’ and ‘Have a seat’ in an attempt to be hospitable. Clearly, nobody feels surprised or offended, although the verb mood used is the imperative – a mood that is traditionally related to giving orders, a rather hostile act. If it is true that words can be both welcoming and inhospitable, words are not ‘just words’. A variety of data sources is analyzed to tap into a wide spectrum of linguistic forms that are related to hospitality. Our findings suggest that hospitality is a strategy that aims to give the interlocutor the feeling of being the beneficiary. Acting as the catalyst between speech act, linguistic form, and the intended communicative message, it explains how it is possible that, in daily life, utterances constructed in imperative mood may be interpreted as hospitable and not as offensive.