Gail Weiss

This special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy offers a wonderful sample of the innovative scholarship that was presented at the fifty-seventh annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, which was hosted by Pennsylvania State University, October 18–20, 2018. We have chosen the title "Critical Phenomenologies: Past, Present, and Future" for this volume because the essays included within it pay close critical attention to temporally thick features of our everyday lived experience. While some of the essays would more readily be identified as "phenomenological" than others, all of them offer valuable contributions to the project of a critical phenomenology as Lisa...

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the fifty-ninth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in September 2021. This virtual conference took place on September 17–18 and 23–26 after the cancellation of the 2020 conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Bonnie Honig and Mel Y. Chen gave the SPEP 2021 Plenary Addresses and we are grateful to be able to include Honig's plenary, "Taking Back the Camera: Race and Agonism in Mr. Deeds and The Fits" in this special issue. Thinking both with and against Stanley Cavell's and Giorgio Agamben's respective readings of...

ABSTRACT Drawing upon Edmund Husserl’s concept of the natural attitude, our taken-for-granted understandings of what is normal, natural, and what should be the case, I argue that when one’s everyday routines are radically disrupted in a sustained way, as has happened with the COVID-19 global pandemic, adjustments are also needed in our natural attitudes so that the latter accurately reflect our actual situation. And yet, the tendency to resist altering one’s natural attitude in response to major changes in one’s life is very strong, as we see with Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Vashti in E. M. Forster’s story, “The Machine Stops.” Both characters, I suggest, offer important cautionary tales as we assess the impact of the “new normal” that has come to characterize daily existence during a global pandemic as well as nostalgic appeals to return, as quickly as possible, to the “old normal” of our pre-pandemic lives. This critical analysis is an especially urgent task given the fact that this pre-pandemic normal was clearly not as positive an experience for some people as for others.

This chapter offers a brief historical overview of the gendered mind/body dualism associated with the rationalist tradition, according to which women’s bodies have been viewed as a threat to reason and to ethics. Taking up critiques of this model offered by Beauvoir and Fanon, I maintain that the body of the Other makes an ethical claim upon us in the form of “bodily imperatives.” I conclude with a critical analysis of contemporary feminist ethics that seeks to move beyond the false dichotomies of mind/body, reason/emotions, transcendence/immanence, and male/female dualisms. Assuming as their starting point the universality of human dependency and the debilitating reality of embodied oppression, contemporary feminist ethicists seek to overturn the sexist, racist, and ableist effects of a philosophical tradition that has always privileged some minds and bodies over others.

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were originally presented at the fifty-eighth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 31 to November 2, 2019. The meeting was hosted by Duquesne University. It featured two outstanding plenary presentations that bear mentioning even though they are not reproduced in these pages: Susan Stryker's "How Being Trans Made Me a Philosopher!" and Robert Brandom's "Magnanimity, Heroism, and Agency: Recognition as Recollection." Stryker explained in her talk how she came to recognize and enact her identity as a trans woman, and to publish her pathbreaking paper, "My Words...

Over the last decade, the international media has devoted increasing attention to operations that separate conjoined twins. Despite the fairly low odds that a child or adult will survive the operation with all of their vital organs intact, most people fail to question the urgency of being physically separated from one’s identical twin. The drive to surgically tear asunder that which was originally joined, I suggest, is motivated in part by a refusal to acknowledge intercorporeality as a basic condition of human existence that doesn’t undermine identity but makes it possible in the first place

This work provides a phenomenological description of gesture, and its significance for the perceptual process. Defining gesture as a social response to a situation that evokes a response from that situation, I examine the different types of social relations that make possible communication through gesture. Next, I consider the significance of bodily intentionality for the development of individual gestures. Specifically, I offer an account of how a bodily style emerges through specific gestures, and I discuss the reciprocal relationship that exists between an individual's style, and his or her body image. ;Through an exploration of the anonymous and personal aspects of the body image, I describe how gender associations can lead to a more anonymous or a more personal way of viewing one's body, and one's bodily capabilities. This leads to a "contextual" account of communication through gesture that employs a Gestaltist, "figure-ground" framework for understanding how gestures are interpreted from a particular perspective that emerges within a more general context of significance. The phenomena of misunderstanding, creativity, conventionality, and repetition, are specifically addressed in relation to one another, and I assess the impact each makes upon communication through gesture. ;Misunderstanding is proposed as a primary impetus for the development of creative gestures, and misunderstanding is discussed as a function of the different social contexts that individuals bring to a given situation. Determining the meaning of a specific gesture or series of gestures is understood to be an ongoing social project that cannot be reduced to the intentions or responses of a single individual. The failure to define the meaning of a given gesture once and for all is attributed to the ambiguity and indeterminacy that attend all communication through gesture. These latter are discussed, moreover, as a positive, rather than a negative, feature of perceptual experience