James Mensch

One of the permanent factors driving philosophy is the puzzle presented by our embodiment. Our consciousness is embodied. We are its embodiment; we are that curious amalgam that we try to describe in terms of mind and body. Philosophy has sought again and again to describe their relation. Yet each time it attempts this from one of these aspects, the other hides itself. From the perspective of mind, everything appears as a content of consciousness. Yet, from the perspective of the body, there are no conscious contents. There are only neural pathways and chemical processes. As thinkers as early as Locke and Leibniz realized, we may search the brain as thoroughly as we wish; within its material structure, we will never find a conscious content.[i] Both perspectives are obviously one-sided. We are both mind and body; we are determined by our conscious contents and our physical makeup. Husserl’s Logical Investigations takes account of this fact in speaking of the real and ideal determination of the subject. As embodied beings, we are subject to real causal laws. Such laws, insofar as the relate to our mental contents, take these as determined by the contents temporally proceeding them.[ii] As engaged in mind, we are also subject to the ideal laws of “authentic thought.” These are nontemporal, logical laws governing “the compatibility or incompatibility of mentally realizable contents.” In the Investigations, the problem of the mind’s relation to the body comes to a head in these two determinations. How can the same set of mental acts be subject to both causal and logical laws? How can a causally determined subject grasp an apodictically certain set of logical relations? As Theodor DeBoer puts this question: “on the one hand, these acts are empirically necessary and determined; on the other hand, an idea realizes itself in them through which they claim apodeictic validity. How can both these views be combined?”[iii]

For over a decade John Searle's ingenious argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence has held a prominent place in contemporary philosophy. This is not just because of its striking central example and the apparent simplicity of its argument. As its appearance in Scientific American testifies, it is also due to its importance to the wider scientific community. If Searle is right, artificial intelligence in the strict sense, the sense that would claim that mind can be instantiated through a formal program of symbol manipulation, is basically wrong. No set of formal conditions can provide us with the characteristic feature of mind which is the intentionally of its mental contents. Formally regarded, such intentionally is an irreducible primitive. It cannot be analyzed into non-intentional (purely syntactic, symbolic) components. This paper will argue that this objection is based on a misunderstanding. Intentionality is not simply something given which is incapable of further analysis. It only appears so when we mistakenly abstract it from time. When we regard its temporal structure, it shows itself as a rule-governed, synthetic process, one capable of being instantiated both by machines and men.

In this essay, Domenico Jervolino summarizes twenty years of Ricoeur’s reading of Patočka’s work, up to the Neapolitan conference of 1997. Nowhere is Ricoeur closer to Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology. Both thinkers belong, together with authors like Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, to a third phase of the phenomenological movement, marked by the search for a new approach to the relation between human beings and world, beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In the search for this approach, Patočka strongly underlines the relation between body, temporality and sociality. Central to this new encounter of Patočka and Ricoeur is the discovery of an idea of inter-human community based on a a-subjective conception of existence.

If post-modern philosophy has a spiritual father, this is surely Nietzsche. The great revival of interest in his thought parallels our period’s discomfort with foundational, “metaphysical” thinking. He appeals to our disquiet with talk of essences. Many find his “deconstruction” of science and morality liberating. Above all his doctrine of “perspectivism” has found a general appeal. The pluralism that is its apparent result is attractive to everyone from feminists to defenders of multiculturalism. There is, however, a darker side to Nietzsche. There is the Nietzsche who speaks of the advance in women’s rights as “one of the worst developments in the general uglification of Europe.”[i] This is the same Nietzsche who teaches that “almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty,”[ii] the Nietzsche, who in answer to his question “whither must we direct our hopes,” speaks of preparing “for great enterprises and collective experiments in discipline and breeding so as to make an end of that gruesome domination of chance and nonsense which has hitherto been called ‘history’...”[iii] As much as we would like to forget the fact, this Nietzsche became the icon of the Nazis

Only rarely does life imitate art in the starkness and directness of its message. When that message is a tragic one the effect becomes indelible. Such was the impact on Peru of the events of Uchuraccay, a small village located in its central highlands. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called it “an emblematic referent of the violence and pain in the collective memory of the country” (TRC, 121). [i] In the twenty-year turmoil that engulfed Peru at the end of the last century, 69280 violent deaths were recorded. What makes Uchuraccay emblematic of this carnage is not just its own destruction; it is the web of misunderstandings that entangled the participants. On January 23, 1983, eight journalists from Lima were caught in this web. Mistaken for terrorists, they and their guide were attacked by the natives of the village. Remarkably, one of the journalists left a photographic record of their slaughter. There also exists a photograph of the bodies of the journalists after they were exhumed a few days later. In it, their eyeless sockets are clearly evident.[ii] When I saw the photo in Lima, it reminded me of the moment in Greek tragedy that is called “recognition.” This is the point when the veil of illusion is stripped from the characters. The most striking example of this is Oedipus’ appearance after he has blinded himself. In his eyeless state, the audience recognizes his previous blindness to his unnatural condition. This moment of recognition is a public exhibition. It is a disclosure of the way things actually were during the events depicted. In what follows, I am going to take this final image of the journalists as a disclosure of the communal blindness that engulfed Peru. My aim is to relate this blindness to the violence that was its tragic correlate.

A. M. Turing argued that there was "little point in trying to make a 'thinking machine' more human by dressing it up in ... artificial flesh." We should, instead, draw "a fairly sharp line between the physical and the intellectual capacities of a man." For over fifty years, drawing this line has meant disregarding the role flesh plays in our intellectual capacities. Correspondingly, intelligence has been defined in terms of the algorithms that both men and machines can perform. I would like to raise some doubts about this paradigm in artificial intelligence research. Intelligence, I believe, does not just involve the working of algorithms. It is founded on flesh's ability to move itself, to feel itself, and to engage in the body projects that accompanied our learning a language. This implies that to copy intelligence -- i.e., to produce an artificial version of it -- the flesh that forms its basis must also be reproduced

Freedom is a perennial topic of philosophy. It is also one of themost puzzling. Regarding it, we are tempted to say with Augustine, “I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me.” 1 We can all sense its presence.We use the word constantly, yet an account of it seems to elude us.My purpose in this paper is to see if phenomenology can provide such an account, one that includes in its description the features philosophers ascribe to freedom. I will have recourse to a number of Husserl’s positions. Although never brought together by Husserl to describe freedom, their presence makes the account a phenomenological and, in a broad sense, a Husserlian one.

For phenomenology, the study of appearances and the ways they come together to present a world, the question of the ego presents special difficulties. The ego, itself, is not an appearance; it is the subject to whom appearances appear. As such, it cannot appear. As the neo-Kantian, Paul Natorp expresses this:“The ego is the subjective center of relation for all contents in my consciousness.... It cannot itself be a content and resembles nothing that could be a content ofconsciousness.” Husserl will wrestle throughout the whole of his career with the issue of how to handle phenomenologically an ego that cannot be considered asa content of consciousness. In this article, I will outline the stages of his journey toward resolving this question.

Much of the current debate opposing empathy to rationality assumes that there are no universal standards for rationality. From the postmodern perspective, the “rational” does not just vary according to the different historical stages of a people. It also differs according the social and cultural conditions that define contemporary communities. What counts as reasonable in the Afghan cultural sphere is often considered as irrational in the Western European context. What Americans take to be rational modes of conduct are not considered to be such in various African communities. For postmodern thinkers, these examples point to the failure of the universalist paradigm inherited from the 18th century. We no longer believe that there is a single paradigm of rationality—once seen as exemplified by philosophy—that is capable of crossing our cultural divides.[i] If appeals to reason cannot bridge cultures, what can? We were all moved by the plight of the victims of the tsunami that devastated the Java Peninsula. Showing their empathy, people around the world contributed to their relief. Doesn’t this exhibit a universal empathy, one capable of bridging the gaps between cultures? A similar argument can be made from the universal appeal of certain works of literature. Reading them, we imaginatively participate in their characters’ lives. We feel what they feel, seeing the world through their eyes. We exercise our empathy in its basic etymological sense of feeling in and through another person. If empathy rather than rationality is genuinely universal, then literature, rather than philosophy, becomes our common language. Similarly, empathy rather than rationality owns the public space uniting different cultures. Appeals to our human solidarity, through literature, movies, television reports and so on must be based on it. [ii] As for philosophy, it becomes relegated to the sphere of our private beliefs and personal convictions. Its sphere is reduced to that of the “true for me.” In what follows, I would like to argue against this separation of empathy and rationality. My position will be that their opposition presupposes a limited, Cartesian concept of rationality. Once we abandon this, we find that empathy and rationality are not, in fact, distinct..

Jan Patočka and Maurice Merleau-Ponty attempted to get beyond Husserl by focusing on manifestation or visibility as such. Yet, the results these philosophers come to are very different — particularly with regard to the a priori of the visible. Are there, as Patočka believed, aspects of being that can be grasped in their entirety, the aspects, namely, that involve its “self-showing”? Or must we say, with Merleau-Ponty, that being can only show itself in finite perspectives that can never be summed to a whole? At stake in their attempts to speak of appearing as appearing is, I propose to show, nothing less than the question of the finitude of being.

This book offers a fresh look at Edmund Husserl’s philosophy as a nonfoundational approach to understanding the self as an embodied presence. Contrary to the conventional view of Husserl as carrying on the Cartesian tradition of seeking a trustworthy foundation for knowledge in the "pure" observations of a disembodied ego, James Mensch introduces us to the Husserl who, anticipating the later investigations of Merleau-Ponty, explored how the body functions to determine our self-presence, our freedom, and our sense of time. The result is a concept of selfhood that allows us to see how consciousness’s arising from sensuous experiences follows from the temporal features of embodiment. From this understanding of what is crucial to Husserl’s phenomenology, the book draws the implications for language and ethics, comparing Husserl’s ideas with those of Derrida on language and with those of Heidegger and Levinas on responsibility. Paradoxically, it is these postmodernists who are shown to be extending the logic of foundationalism to its ultimate extreme, whereas Husserl can be seen as leading the way beyond modernity to a nonfoundational account of the self and its world.