Daniel Smyth

Hermann Schmitz offers one of the most extensive descriptions available of embodied space, characterizing it as pre-sensorial, indivisible, and surfaceless yet capable of disclosing absolute locations. Schmitz nevertheless anchors the felt body’s absolute location in temporal irruption rather than in the ability for lived space to ground itself in rest. This article argues that embodied space tacitly involves trans-perceptual conditions of stability and tolerability that Schmitz’s account opens up but does not fully develop. I introduce the concept of existential surface to name this dimension, with the ground underfoot as its paradigmatic case. Acute fatigue serves as the principal test case: it discloses both the felt body’s dependence on a body-bearing world and an autochthonous self-grounding limit of the felt body. I analyze the latter in terms of a recessive boundary that resists further movement and reorganizes practical initiative around what I call being-toward-rest.

This review examines how the Phenomenology of Broken Habits (Routledge, 2025) organizes its diverse contributions around a central thesis — that habits become especially knowable through their breakdown. This review argues that many of the volume’s most valuable chapters in fact elide this frame, analyzing instead habits in their formation, rigidification, transformation, and unbreakability. The result is characterized here as unintended yet productive, as the volume collectively testifies to the epistemic relevance of habit well beyond breakdown. This emerges from a detailed engagement with the individual contributions of Wehrle, Čapek, Hewig, Crossley, Munch-Jurisic, Brincker, and Cavallaro. The review concludes by endorsing how such internal tensions within the volume promote a reading experience that is itself a transformative philosophical habit: namely of appreciating conceptual overdetermination without collapsing into reductive systematicity.

This article sketches a strategy for teaching Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Origin”). I illustrate how one can address Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation while simultaneously engaging his philosophy of art on its own terms—goals that often work at cross purposes in the classroom. Like many, I read “Origin” together with Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of a van Gogh still life of shoes, which figures so prominently in “Origin.” My innovation is to pair the Heidegger/Schapiro dispute with Holocaust imagery of victims’ shoes and personal effects. Such imagery serves to introduce historical and political context for the debate and to highlight methodological differences in their conceptions of the meaning, reception, and interpretation of artworks and images more generally. These differences raise big-picture questions about the norms that govern our engagements with art and the theoretical desiderata we want a philosophy of art to satisfy. The dispute between Heidegger and Schapiro, read in conjunction with Holocaust imagery, lends these rather abstract questions a concreteness and urgency that greatly enhances classroom discussion.