Hicham Jakha

Blaustein explores the phenomenon of listening to the radio play. The idea put forth by the author is that the radio play engages perception, treating the latter in a broad sense. Perception is not necessarily restricted to seeing; rather, it is understood as being cross-modal, as involving different senses. The main sense involved in the case of radio plays is hearing, which enables one to listen to the radio. Radio listeners are drawn into radio plays as media of hearing. Instead of vision, listeners engage their “acousion,” a term coined by Blaustein to capture the perceptual distinctness of hearing; acousion is the auditive perception of radio plays. Listening to a radio play is a lived experience or a psychic phenomenon, precisely due to the activeness of acousion. Listeners do not only passively perceive or hear auditive data. They also engage their imaginative faculties, presenting to themselves, mentally, the world of the action; by so doing, listeners enable the act of listening. According to Blaustein, presentations, even imaginative ones, are basic. By listening to a radio play, the listener imaginatively presents the world of the action to themselves, as if they were watching a theater play. However, going beyond the realm of presentations, other factors are examined, e.g., the listener’s focus is turned into the world represented—the world within—, which is given to them via auditive data and dialogue.

I analyze the aesthetic experience of theatergoers in light of Meinong’s “assumptions” and Blaustein’s “imaginative presentations,” taking Brentano’s “universality thesis” as the background of my analyses. I argue that “presentations” and “judgments” go hand in hand, as far as theater experience is concerned. To put forth my main argument, I follow a two-fold line of reasoning: phenomenological and ontological. On the phenomenological level, Blaustein’s imaginative presentations, I argue, are self-sufficient. Nonetheless, on the ontological level, the theater’s represented objects emerge as having a two-sided structure that undermines the phenomenological simplicity of presentations. By characterizing represented objects’ ontology in this manner, I admit Meinong’s assumptions as a fourth class of mental phenomena, and, beyond the frameworks of both Meinong and Blaustein, incorporate judgments into the aesthetic experience of theater.

This article puts forth a perceptual–phenomenological defence of “thought theory” as a solid solution to the paradox of fiction. Arguing against Kendall Walton’s pretence solution to Charles’s fear and going along the lines of Peter Lamarque’s and Noël Carroll’s thought theory, my proposed defence makes use of the philosophy of a figure who is rarely discussed in the context of phenomenology and never discussed in the context of the paradox of fiction: Leopold Blaustein. To bring forth my proposed perceptual–phenomenological defence, I devise Blaustein’s descriptive account of “perception” and its role in shaping aesthetic experience. Within this line of thought, I further develop a perceptualist reading of Blaustein, paralleling Christine Tappolet’s version, that may be of service to proponents of the “perceptual theory of emotions.”

This article brings two outstanding figures into conversation about the problem of fictional entities and their indeterminacies: Roman Ingarden and David Lewis. Lewis’s account of fiction lacks an adequate ontology of ficta-qua-objects. Relying on his modal realism does not help, for it would make ficta “concrete” entities that merely indexically differ from our world’s entities. In this regard, I refer to Ingarden’s “purely intentional entities”. I read Lewis’s possible worlds in terms of Ingarden’s ontology; hence establishing what I term a “Purely Intentional Modal Fictionalism”. In so doing, the demarcation between fiction and actuality is preserved. In return, Lewis’s Analyses adequately account for Ingarden’s “spots of indeterminacy”. Therefore, my proposal reconciles Ingarden’s ficta with Lewis’s possibilist approach to truth in fiction. This approach grounds Lewis’s account in a less problematic ontology with a distinct sui generis status for ficta and provides Ingarden’s ficta with better determination principles.

In this article, I analyze Charles Crittenden’s account of fictional objects in his Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects (1991). I argue that Crittenden’s sketchy ontology of fictional objects does not support his weak eliminativism. Going along the lines of Amie Thomasson (1999), I stress that the problem of fictional objects is a strictly ontological problem, which requires an ontological solution. A solution to the problem of fictional objects (or ficta) that accommodates “practice” (ordinary language and literary practices) is of course to be praised, but not when it is foregrounded at the expense of “ontology.” I argue for Roman Ingarden as a champion of ontology and practice, whose way of dealing with ficta fares better than Crittenden’s on both the ontological and practical sides. In short, ficta should be approached as something over and above mere grammaticalia (grammatical objects) namely as “purely intentional” objects that are formally incomplete, and which readers complete by resorting to practices of language and literary criticism.

In my paper, I establish an Ingardenian phenomenological ontology of "virtualized ficta", i.e., fictional entities introduced to virtual gaming. The first Section of my paper provides an ontology of virtualized ficta, focusing primarily on their ‘‘existential moments’’. But in order to have a firm grasp of the ontological aspects grounding the virtual work, it’s important to engage its strata. This is what I attempt to do in Section 1.2. Virtualized ficta’s intentional dependencies are strongly manifest in what I call the ‘‘strata of the virtual work’’. That is, I repurpose Ingarden’s strata of the literary work, the picture, and the film to showcase that virtualized ficta, from the bottom up (i.e., from their pure ontology to aesthetics) are purely intentional entities. In short, I argue for a purely intentional account of virtualized ficta as ficta-made-virtualia, whose ontological status is determined by the creative acts of game developers and gamers.

In this paper, I argue for phenomenology, Husserlian phenomenology to be precise, as providing a solid paradigm on how to determine and assess hallucination. To be more explicit, in the context of my deliberations, I analyze Susanna Schellenberg’s arguments for “phenomenal” evidence and “factive” evidence, as regards her evidential theory of perception. To pinpoint the inadequacies raised in her account of (the hallucinating) Hallie and (the veridically perceiving) Percy sharing any kind of evidence, I propose Edmund Husserl’s epistemic fulfillment as a detailed epistemological analysis of perception, which takes into consideration the latter’s phenomenological complexity.

In this article, I explore the problems of ficta ‘generation’ and ‘properties’ in light of the philosophies of Alexius Meinong and Roman Ingarden. Comparing Ingarden and the historical Meinong is not a novel idea. By contrast, comparing Ingarden and a phenomenological Meinong has not, to my knowledge, yet been explored. Here, I rely on Alberto Voltolini’s ‘phenomenological conception of außerseiende entities’. I devise Ingarden’s phenomenological ontology to account for the problems of ascription and generation that cripple Meinong’s account. In short, I argue that Ingarden’s account is better suited to accommodate ficta’s generation and properties in a way that does not complicate our approach to fiction.

Husserl’s allegiance to realism came under attack following his Ideas. Ingarden was a fierce critic of his teacher’s turn to transcendental idealism and provided compelling arguments both for his idealist reading of Husserl and for his rejection of idealism. One of the main arguments Ingarden devised against Husserl’s turn was based on his aesthetics. Against Husserl, Ingarden established literary works and fictional objects as purely intentional objects that are (1) doubly structured, vis-à-vis their formal ontology, and (2) endowed with spots of indeterminacy. These facts, Ingarden argues, necessitate the transcendence of the purely intentional object. In this paper, I explore his argument, while establishing the ontological foundation on which it rests.

In this paper, I attempt to find a middle ground between the formalist critic, Vladimir Propp, and the psychoanalytic critic, Carl Jung. I argue that, instead of regarding Russian formalism and psychoanalysis as irreconcilable adversaries, the theories of the two figures can (and should) be unified; the result of which can be devised to establish a theory of what I call an ‘‘archetypal narrative’’. To be more explicit, Propp’s Morphology and Jung’s archetypal psychoanalysis are reconciled to bring about an archetypal narrative theory, in which the underlying structure of narratives lies in the collective unconscious of humanity.

In a work recently published as part of the Cambridge Elements series, Janet Levin brings together the most important contemporary theories that attempt to answer the question of the mental. In her book, The Metaphysics of Mind (2022), she acknowledges that the metaphysical questions surrounding the mind should be distinguished from the epistemological and moral ones. While taking into consideration the implications of the epistemological and moral questions for the metaphysics of mind, Levin focuses primarily on the metaphysical questions. To accomplish the task at hand, she analyzes Dualism, Type-Identity Theory, Role Functionalism, Russellian Monism, and Eliminativism (or Illusionism). As she makes clear at the outset of her book, the aim of her text is not to argue for or against a certain metaphysical theory of mind, but rather to assess the merits and demerits of each theory objectively. A good metaphysics of mind should account for certain elements that are taken to be key to the controversy over the mental. These elements range from the qualitative character of sensations and perceptual experiences, the outer-directedness of intentional states (beliefs, desires, etc.) to — basically— the space the mind occupies in nature as a whole. In this piece, I review each theory of mind separately, as approached by Levin. Then I conclude my review with some critical remarks about the book.

In this paper, I attempt to formulate an Ingardenian conception of the literary work’s aesthetic value. Following Mitscherling’s lead, I attempt to place Ingarden’s aesthetics within his overall phenomenological-ontological project. That is, I argue that Ingarden’s aesthetics can only be properly fathomed in the context of his ontological deliberations, since, as he himself often enunciated, all his philosophical investigations constitute a realist rejoinder to Husserl’s turn toward transcendental idealism. To this end, I bring together insights from his aesthetics and ontology to establish a coherent account of values, where artistic and aesthetic values are analyzed as they manifest themselves in the literary work of art. By attending to the ontology of its aesthetic (and artistic) values, I argue, the literary work’s stratified formation becomes more explicit. Keywords: Roman Ingarden, aesthetic value, artistic value, the literary work of art, ontology, aesthetics