Elisa Magrì

In this paper, I shall focus on the role of bodily self-displacement in Stein’s account of empathy, pointing out its relevance in the general dimension of affectivity. In my view, Stein grounds empathy on a dynamic model of embodied self-experience, which shares significant similarities with Varela & Depraz’s neurophenomenology. However, I shall argue that Stein’s view of empathy cannot be reduced to a naturalised phenomenological sense and that bodily self-displacement is pre-condition of a more complex disposition towards others as in line with Ratcliffe’s theory of radical empathy.

Whether we consider habit as a psychological phenomenon or as part of the ontology of social structures, it resists exact localization. Owing to this fact, the motivational factors that link habit to the repetition of the same action in a specific context are often overlooked. To shed light on the nature of habit and the process of habit formation, I distinguish two main lines of interpretation: the intellectualist and the social view. Both accounts reproduce, in different ways, the paradigm of rule‐following. Drawing on Merleau‐Ponty’s phenomenology, I outline an alternative model of explanation that centres on the relation between habit and value sensitivity. This approach illustrates the sort of responsiveness (and associated limits) at stake in habit formation, and what makes habit a required response to the context.

Editorial Board: Karl P. Ameriks, Margaret Atherton, Frederick Beiser, Fabien Capeillères, Faustino Fabbianelli, Daniel Garber, Rudolf A. Makkreel, Steven Nadler, Alan Nelson, Christof Rapp, Ursula Renz, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Denis Thouard, Paul Ziche, Günter Zöller The series publishes monographs and essay collections devoted to the history of philosophy as well as studies in the theory of writing the history of philosophy. A special emphasis is placed on the contextualization of philosophical historiography into the areas of the history of science, culture, and the wider scope of intellectual history.

According to Habermas, Hegel’s early reflections in Jena on labour and language do not bear upon logical categories. In Habermas’s view, the formative model that Hegel proposes in his early texts on labour and language is lost in his mature philosophy. In this paper, I shall propose an intra-systematic reading of Hegel’s philosophy that challenges Habermas’s dualistic reading. I shall point out the dialectical relation between labour, memory, and the logical concept (Begriff). In doing so, I will emphasize the fact that memory and labour are based on the refutation of the use of mechanical causality in the genesis of the subject, the argument for which is illustrated in the Science of Logic. Finally, I will argue that the genesis of the logical concept coincides with a formative process that is grounded in the Science of Logic and yet underlies the genesis of subjectivity as spontaneous capacity of self-determination.

Hegel’s psychology provides an account of cognition that is held together by the twofold activity of memory, involving Erinnerung (recollection) and Gedächtnis (memory proper). While Hegel’s account of cognition is often investigated in relation to conceptual and logical thinking, in this contribution I explore more closely the contribution of memory to the generation of semantic content. I argue that this view of memory sustains critical awareness about representations of facts and events, serving as the foundation for practical philosophy and ethics. To do justice to Hegel’s approach and understand its modus operandi, I reconstruct the dynamics of cognition through the model of sedimentation. This is the theoretical process that generates knowledge by retaining and understanding the content of experience. I proceed by positioning Hegel’s psychology and the role of the mind in its systematic context. Then, I introduce the model of sedimentation, and how this is connected to Hegel’s use of Erinnerung and Gedächtnis. Next, I distinguish between the sedimentation of images and that of signs, explaining the genesis of thought out of memory. Finally, I offer some reflections on the moral relevance of memory in the context of Hegel’s psychology.

Hegel’s account of action in the Encyclopedia defies the standard belief–desire model of action in that he holds that having beliefs is not in itself normative, nor having desires or wishes. At the same time, he argues that our actions are expressive of our reasons to act, including beliefs and practical feelings. By drawing attention on the dialectic between deeds and practical feelings as well as on the role of interest, the author distinguishes two orders of moral motivation in Hegel’s theory of practical spirit: a first-order motivation concerned with self-realization, and a second-order motivation that expresses interest in shared commitments and obligations. Taken together, both types of interest delineate Hegel’s theory of responsive conduct. One upshot of this view is the reevaluation of moral action in terms of processes rather than events, which also makes room for a noncognitivist appraisal of action in Hegel.

Phenomenology is one of the leading movements in twentieth-century philosophy and continues to exert a strong influence on many contemporary philosophical traditions and investigations. In recent years, phenomenological insights have been increasingly developed in relation to philosophy of illness, disability, race, gender, sexuality, and politics, leading to the emergence of critical phenomenology as a new, prominent field for interdisciplinary research. Magrì and McQueen's Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction is the first book of its kind, addressing the critical questions at the core of both classical and contemporary phenomenology. This book provides a concise, accessible introduction to key areas of phenomenological research, such as intersubjectivity, bodily experience, race, gender, social experience, and political action. In doing so, it demonstrates both the rich history of phenomenology and its continuing philosophical and ethical importance.

This chapter explores the concept of sedimentation in Hegel’s account of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s 1954–55 course notes on institution and passivity. The chapter first identifies the notion of sedimentation that informs Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on institution. Such a sedimentation involves a non-egoic modality of retention that activates critical thinking. The chapter then explains why absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit rests on a process of sedimentation that is very much in line with Merleau-Ponty’s analysis. My argument revolves on the aspects of self-appropriation and ownership that characterize Hegel’s account of absolute spirit, which are integral to a Hegelian-inspired view of ethical memory.

From a phenomenological perspective, social perception allows degrees of flexibility and critical self-assessment that are not entirely conditioned by the social environment. My goal in this chapter is to take into closer consideration the processes that engender perceptual learning and unlearning in Husserl’s phenomenology. I proceed by examining the relation between social perception and the intersubjective sense of reality, before identifying the doxastic positionality that characterizes perception, and its relation to typification and perceptual unlearning. By way of conclusion, I explain in what sense Husserl’s approach lends itself to an account of social sensitivity.

Readers of Hegel’s philosophy will welcome Nicholas Mowad’s interpretation of Hegel’s anthropology not just as a fundamental addition to Hegel scholarship, but also, and more fundamentally, as a necessary invitation to read Hegel in a new key. This entails paying attention to questions of embodiment, race, and gender that are intrinsic to Hegel’s philosophical anthropology. The book’s chief merit lies in the way Mowad convincingly shows that issues of race and gender cannot be avoided while reading Hegel, and that Hegel’s approach to such themes is firmly rooted in the experience of nature as a locus of transformation and critical distance from entrenched racial and gender disparities.Mowad concentrates on the...

In this paper, I shall investigate Edith Stein’s account of empathic subjectivity in light of the “affective turn” that characterises the current literature on Stein’s phenomenology. I shall argue that Stein develops an original approach to empathy that is not restricted to the model of “direct access” to others. I shall claim that, for Stein, empathy is an attitude that shares significant similarities with retention and imagining-how. More precisely, I shall show that the significance of empathy lies in striving to respond appropriately to the other through the constitution of types or examples that involve features inherent in personality and values.

With the exception of James Ostrow’s 1990 study, social sensitivity has received scarce attention in philosophy, whilst it has become an important area of research in social and clinical psychology, where it is commonly known as interpersonal sensitivity. The latter is usually understood as a form of social skill to appropriately recognise and decode the appearance and behaviour of others. However, this view suffers from conceptual limitations in that it tends to reduce social sensitivity to standardised skilful behaviour. Drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, I disambiguate social sensitivity from social skills, arguing that the former builds on the receptivity of habit to beliefs and cognitive dissonance. In this revised sense, social sensitivity informs processes of attitude change that challenge ingrained dispositions and potentially defy social codes and expectations.

For Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, the concept of expression is crucial to understand meaning and signification in a variety of contexts, including the aesthetic, anthropological, and psychological domain. However, they also point out the paradoxical nature of the notion of expression, in that it presupposes what it is supposed to explain, namely its principle of determination. In my reading, both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty endorse a common strategy to avoid the paradox, and their approach is rooted in the use of genetic descriptions. In this way, they bring to light the active side of receptivity without producing any hypostatization of a prior Logos. Before addressing their common strategy, I briefly present the earlier articulation of the problem of expression in Hegel’s Science of Logic.

: This paper aims to situate the roles of attention and habit in contemporary approaches to embodied cognition with particular regard to the conceptualisation of affordances. While Chemero has argued that affordances have a relational character that rules out dispositions, Rietveld and Kiverstein have suggested that engaging with affordances amounts to exercising skills. By critically reconsidering the distinction between dispositions and abilities proposed by Chemero, as well as the standard theory of habit that underpins accounts of skilful coping, I propose to disambiguate habit from skill and to reassess the phenomenology of dispositions. Dispositions are motivational factors that depend on two elements: sensitivity to context clues, which is regulated by habit and attention, and the positionality of the subject, which is inseparable from context-awareness. Drawing on Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s insights, I argue that both and can accommodate a dispositional view of affordances. Keywords: Habit; Attention; Affordances; Dispositions; Phenomenology; Embodied Cognition Situare attenzione e abitudine nel panorama delle affordance Riassunto: L’articolo mira a situare i ruoli svolti dall’attenzione e dall’abitudine negli approcci contemporanei all’ embodied cognition, con particolare attenzione alla concettualizzazione delle affordance. Se, un da un lato, Chemero ha sostenuto che l’ affordance ha un carattere relazionale, che esclude le disposizioni, Rietveld e Kiverstein, dall’altro lato, mantengono che il coinvolgimento nell’ affordance corrisponde all’esercizio di abilità pratiche. Nel riconsiderare criticamente la distinzione fra disposizioni e abilità avanzata da Chemero, così come la concezione standard dell’abitudine che è alla base delle teorie di skilful coping, propongo di disambiguare l’abitudine dalle abilità e di rivalutare la fenomenologia delle disposizioni. Queste ultime sono elementi motivazionali che dipendono da due fattori: sensibilità verso il contesto, che è governata dall’abitudine e dall’attenzione, e la posizionalità del soggetto, la quale è inseparabile dalla consapevolezza del contesto. Basandosi su Husserl e Merleau-Ponty, l’articolo difende l’ipotesi che sia che possono soddisfare una concezione disposizionale dell’ affordance. Parole chiave: Abitudine; Attenzione; Disposizioni; Fenomenologia; Cognizione incarnata

This volume articulates and develops new research questions and original insights regarding the philosophical dialogue between Hegel’s philosophy, his heritage, and contemporary phenomenology, including, among others, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. The collection discusses methodological questions concerning the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy for contemporary phenomenology, addressing core issues revolving around the key concepts of history, being, science, subjectivity, and dialectic. The volume fills a gap in historiography, expanding the knowledge of the impact of Hegel's philosophy on contemporary philosophy and raising new questions on the transformation of transcendental philosophy in post-Kantian philosophy. The contributions gathered in this volume shed new light on issues related to the problem of scientific method in philosophy, on the philosophy of history, as well as on the dimension of subjectivity. By providing critical insights into Hegel’s philosophy and contemporary phenomenology, the book opens up new research perspectives recommended to philosophers and scholars of different traditions, especially classical German philosophy, phenomenology, and history of Western philosophy.