-
11Rethinking Spontaneism: Rosa Luxemburg, Skilful Expertise, and the Politics of HabitJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 55 (1): 12-27. 2023.Rosa Luxemburg defended a view of spontaneism as a way of according strategic priority to popular initiatives over the directives of vanguard parties. But she never worked out a theory of spontaneism, and consequently it has typically been dismissed as lacking solid grounds. In this paper, I take an initial step toward rehabilitating spontaneism by rethinking its assumptions concerning historical agency in embodied habitual terms. After first outlining Luxemburg’s view of spontaneism itself, I c…Read more
-
16Critical Phenomenology and the Mythopoetics of NatureJournal of Speculative Philosophy 37 (3): 381-392. 2023.ABSTRACT The idea of “critical phenomenology” is premised on the belief that there is a radically critical political impetus intrinsic to phenomenology as such. This belief is sound, but its grounds are unclear. This article clarifies the sense of critical phenomenology by showing how it is based in the methodological need for a generative apprehension of nature as the outermost horizon of experience, that this horizon is pregiven in the mythic Urdoxa of the lifeworld, and that critical phenomen…Read more
-
5Review of Galen A. Johnson, Mauro Carbone, and Emmanuel De Saint Aubert. Merleau-Ponty’s Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature (review)Chiasmi International 24 409-414. 2022.
-
12Bensaïd’s Jeanne: Strategic Mythopoesis for Difficult TimesPhilosophies 8 (1): 12. 2023.In this essay, I consider the significance of Daniel Bensaïd’s work on Jeanne d’Arc with regard to dealing with the “difficult times” in which we live. (1) I first consider some of the background in early critical theory in order to show that Bensaïd’s aim to recover Benjamin’s notion of a “weak messianic power” requires following through with Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of enlightenment, and that this implies a critical rehabilitation of myth and mythopoesis. (2) Approaching Bensaïd’s acco…Read more
-
9Merleau-Ponty's Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of PhilosophyBloomsbury Academic. 2014.Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception - a canonical text of twentieth-century philosophy - concludes with an appeal to 'heroism' by citing a series of enigmatic sentences drawn from Saint-Exupe;ry's Pilote de guerre. Surprisingly, however, these lines are antithetical to the philosophical thrust of Merleau-Ponty's project. This book aims to explain this situation. Foregrounding liminal themes in Merleau-Ponty's thought that have been largely overlooked - e.g., sacrifice, death, myth, faith…Read more
-
11Mythopoetic naturalizationMetodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 9 (2): 469-500. 2021.This paper sketches a new approach to the critical-theoretic problem of reification understood as a normatively problematic form of naturalizing or dehistoricizing entifcation. Entifcation in general is approached phenomenologically in terms of the mythic outer horizonality of the lifeworld, and reification is shown to stem from the dichotomy between nature and history which, along with a corresponding dichotomy between myth and reason, is characteristic of Enlightenment rationality. Dereificati…Read more
-
4Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology by Rajiv KaushikReview of Metaphysics 74 (4): 630-632. 2021.
-
2Merleau-Ponty's Developmental Ontology by David MorrisReview of Metaphysics 73 (4): 852-854. 2020.
-
9Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique (edited book)Lexington Books. 2021.This volume examines various points of contact between Marxism and phenomenology. Although these traditions can appear conceptually incompatible, the contributors reveal productive complementarities on themes such as alienation, reification, and ecology, which illuminate and can help to resolve the crises of contemporary capitalism.
-
23De-Moralizing HeroismSouthwest Philosophy Review 36 (1): 65-74. 2020.Agents’ self-reports in cases of reactive heroism often deny the optionality, and hence the supererogatory status, of their actions, while conversely supporting a view of these actions in terms of nonselfsacrificial existential necessity. Taking such claims seriously thus makes it puzzling as to why such cases elicit strong approbation. To resolve this puzzle, I show how this necessity can be understood in the predispositional embodied terms of unreflective ethical expertise, such that the agent…Read more
-
12Konstantinos Kavoulakos, "Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Praxis: From Neo-Kantianism to Marxism." Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 40 (1): 22-24. 2020.
-
35Ich kann nicht anders: Social Heroism as Nonselfsacrificial Practical NecessityFrontiers in Psychology 9. 2018.Most self-reports of heroic action in both reactive and social (proactive) cases describe the experience as involving a kind of necessity. This seems intuitively sound, but it makes it unclear why heroism is accorded strong approbation. To resolve this, I show that the necessity involved in heroism is a nonselfsacrificial practical necessity. (1) Approaching the intentional structure of human action from the perspective of embodiment, focusing especially on the predispositionality of pre-reflect…Read more
-
60Michael J. Thompson, ed., Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics; Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall, eds., Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence. Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, Review by Bryan Smyth (review)Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 16 (2): 274-280. 2012.
-
Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 25 (3): 208-210. 2005.
-
11Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception (review)Symposium 11 (1): 188-193. 2007.
-
17Matthew Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 30 (2): 132-134. 2010.
-
34Merleau-Ponty and the Generation of AnimalsPhaenEx 2 (2): 170-215. 2007.Merleau-Ponty recognized that phenomenology's methodological coherence required that it reject anthropocentricity and extend its scope beyond the human realm. But he also recognized that this does not change the central role played by human consciousness in phenomenology, which he thus construed as a practical, humanistic project based on 'ontological faith'. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological contributions concerning animals, then, and in particular his notion of 'interanimality', need to be unde…Read more
-
360Generating SenseSchutzian Research 3 (n/a): 121-132. 2011.The aim of phenomenology is to provide a critical account of the origins and genesis of the world. This implies that the standpoint of the phenomenologicalreduction is properly extramundane. But it remains an outstanding task to formulate a credible account of the reduction that would be adequate to this seemingly impossible methodological condition. This paper contributes to rethinking the reduction accordingly. Building on efforts to thematize its intersubjective and corporeal aspects, the red…Read more
-
9The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday (review)Symposium 11 (2): 468-471. 2007.
-
37Ted Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Nature (review)Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 15 (2): 251-255. 2011.
-
45Kascha Semonovitch and Neal DeRoo, eds. , Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception . Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 31 (1): 70-73. 2011.
-
Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-PontyPhilosophy in Review 28 (1): 64. 2008.
-
36The Meontic and the Militant: On Merleau-Ponty’s Relation to Fink∗International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (5): 669-699. 2011.This paper clarifies the relationship between Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation with regard to ‘the idea of a transcendental theory of method’. Although Fink’s text played a singularly important role in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought, contrary to recent claims made by Ronald Bruzina this influence was not positive. Reconstructing the basic methodological claims of each text, in particular with regard to the being of the phenomen…Read more
-
13Michael Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique. Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 35 (4): 228-230. 2015.
-
20Merleau-Ponty and the Myth of Human IncarnationJournal of Speculative Philosophy 30 (3): 382-394. 2016.In this article I will argue that Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology—in particular as this was initially worked out in Phenomenology of Perception1—is premised methodologically on a certain mythic view of nature and of human embodiment in particular. I will claim, in other words, that the corporeal turn that is central to the philosophical attractiveness of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology rests upon a myth. Within the constraints of this short article, I will explain how …Read more
-
10Generating Sense: Schizophrenia and Phenomenological PraxisSchutzian Research. A Yearbook of Worldly Phenomenology and Qualitative Social Science 3 (n/a): 121-132. 2011.The aim of phenomenology is to provide a critical account of the origins and genesis of the world. This implies that the standpoint of the phenomenologicalreduction is properly extramundane. But it remains an outstanding task to formulate a credible account of the reduction that would be adequate to this seemingly impossible methodological condition. This paper contributes to rethinking the reduction accordingly. Building on efforts to thematize its intersubjective and corporeal aspects, the red…Read more
Oxford, Mississippi, United States of America