Jonna Bornemark

This chapter examines the unique collaboration between humans and dogs in Search and Rescue (SAR) work through the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Jakob von Uexküll, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Vinciane Despret. Deleuze’s notion of the body as a dynamic site of affects, articulated through a reading of his interpretation of Uexküll, underscores how SAR dog teams operate as an integrated unit in relation to their environment. Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt offers insight into the subjective world of the dog, showing how their perception co-shapes the team’s actions. Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of behavior as melodic emphasizes the fluid, embodied coordination between dog and human. Finally, in Despret’s work, these thinkers converge offering a rich framework for understanding how humans and other animals co-create their worlds through ongoing, affective exchanges. Together, these perspectives highlight SAR dog work as a collaborative process that blurs species boundaries, where effectiveness arises through mutual attunement. By engaging these philosophical frameworks, and by composing them into one body with observations of SAR dog teams at work and testimonies of experienced handlers, the study deepens our understanding of the interspecies relationality that underpins successful SAR efforts.

This essay explores the possibility of conceptualizing an asymmetrical ethics, with the vantage point that ethics is not only something required for asymmetrical relations but also something itself which requires asymmetry to arise. We expand on previous thinking on the importance of the asymmetrical to the ethical by elaborating three concrete examples of real-world praxis. In our summary of the theoretical background, we first show how Feminist ethics has developed from being a project aiming at the dismantling of the unjust asymmetries of the social world into an appeal to not unjustly impose symmetry in a violent fashion. We then explicate Emanuel Levinas’ reconceptualization of the ethical attitude as an asymmetrical attitude of openness to the other, to then show how Adriana Cavarero develops this openness to the other into a cherishing of the singularity of life. We go on to introduce our own contribution, presenting the three examples of Pregnancy, Horse-riding, and BDSM as concrete situations where asymmetry must not only be ethical to be defensible but ethics must also be asymmetrical to be applicable. We conclude by discussing how the asymmetrical ethical dimension of these three examples offers new ways of conceptualizing responsibility and pleasure in relations of power.

In this article I will examine Stein’s discussions on alterity. In her early writings Stein develops the theme of alterity mainly in relation to the concept of empathy (Einfuhlung) and thus in relation to the other person. In her later writings the theme of alterity mainly relates to God. I will discuss the continuity and discontinuity between these two areas. I will claim that alterity in her early writings can be understood as invisibility within visibility whereas alterity in her later writings can be understood as visibility within invisibility.

This text explores Search and Rescue (SAR) dog work, examining the interplay of Umwelt, semiosis, and behavior in both dogs and humans. Drawing on Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, the discussion unfolds across two semiotic levels: endosemiosis, involving the constitution of species-specific Umwelten through non-mimetic processes, and exosemiosis, reflecting semiotic interactions within the established Umwelt. Emphasizing the Kantian influence on Uexküll, the text parallels the concept of transcendental schematism with monogram drafting, illustrating how organisms constitute their Umwelten. The exploration extends to Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the monogram in Kant and the Umwelt in Uexküll, framing behavior as melodic and underscoring the reciprocal influence between an organism and its Umwelt. Shifting focus to SAR dog teams, the essay elucidates the melodic teamwork between human handlers and dogs. It discerns the convergence of distinct search tones—human-driven rescue tones and dog-driven reward tones—harmonizing in a dynamic inter-species melody. The melodic metaphor, inspired by Merleau-Ponty, illuminates the shared behavioral space where humans and dogs contribute tonalities to the melody of SAR searches. The exploration underscores the handler’s role in facilitating this melodic collaboration, requiring interpretation deeply immersed in the movements of the dog, and a balance between guidance and trust in the dog’s autonomy during the search.

This article takes its point of departure in Bracha Ettinger’s discussion on the “matrixial borderspace”: the structure of the experience of “the womb,” both from a “mother-pole” and a “fetus-pole”. Ettinger describes this borderspace as a place of differentiation-in-co-emergence, separation-in-jointness, and distance-in-proximity. The question this article poses is what kind of logic this experience is an expression of, as there seems to be a discrepancy in relation to the classical Aristotelian logic of identity. As an alternative to classical Aristotelian logic, Nicholas of Cusa’s logic of the non-aliud is explored as a paradigm more in line with Ettinger’s description of pregnancy specifically and more generally, to an understanding of life as a co-poietic emergence of structures of pactivity and permeability.

A century after the World War I, studies on the politics of memory and commemoration have grown into a vast and vital academic field. This book approaches the theme "monument and memory" from architectural, literary, philosophical, and theological perspectives. Drawing on diverse sources - from Augustine to Freud, from early photographs to contemporary urban monuments - the book's contributors probe the intersections between memory and trauma, past and present, monuments and memorial practices, religious and secular, remembrance and forgetfulness. (Series: Nordic Studies in Theology / Nordische Studien zur Theologie - Vol. 1) [Subject: Philosophy, Religious Studies, History]

Societal views on animals are rapidly changing and have become more diversified: can we use them for our own pleasure, and how should we understand animal agency? These questions, asked both in theoretical discourses and different practices, are also relevant for our understanding of horses and the human-horse relation. Equine Cultures in Transition stands as the first volume to bring together ethical questions of the new field of human-horse studies. For instance: what sort of ethics should be developed in relation to the horse today: an egalitarian ethics or an ethics that builds upon asymmetrical relations? How can we understand the horse as a social actor and as someone who, just like the human being, becomes through interspecies relations? Through which methods can we give the horse a stronger voice and better understand its becoming? These questions are not addressed from a medical or ethological perspective focused on natural behaviour, but rather from human acknowledgement of the horse as a sensing, feeling, acting, and relational being; and as a part of interspecies societies and relations. Providing an introductory yet theoretically advanced and broad view of the field of post humanism and human animal studies, Equine Cultures in Transition will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as human-animal studies, political sociology, animals and ethics, animal behaviour, anthropology, and sociology of culture. It may also appeal to riders and other practitioners within different horse traditions.

In this paper I will discuss the concept “limit-situation” as it is developed in Karl Jaspers' early writings, especially his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen and Philosophie, and explore how this concept could be understood in a broader way. After a discussion of the concepts of “limit” and “situation” I will discuss Jaspers' heritage from Kant and Kierkegaard, in whose works the concepts of antinomy and paradox are central. Antinomy is worked out in Jaspers' thinking as single limit-situations in which the human being understands her finitude and openness. It is through these single limit-situations that her world-view is shaped. Through a discussion of Jaspers' communication theory and his understanding of the mystics, I will extend the concept of limit-situation from the single limit-situations. I will argue that the limit-situation should be understood, not only as a concept marking the limits of the human situation, but as a way of exploring the human situation as limit.

In phenomenology, theories of empathy are intimately connected with the question of how it is possible to have insight into the mind of the other person. In this article, the author wants to show why it is self-evident for us that the other person is having experiences. In order to do so, it is not enough to discuss the phenomenon of empathy with a starting point in the already constituted adult person; instead the article presents a genetic approach to human development. The author thus contrasts Edith Stein’s discussion of Einfühlung (empathy), which takes its starting point in the experience of the grown-up, with Max Scheler’s discussion of Einsfühlung (feeling of oneness), where the relation between mother and infant is taken as one example. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the world of the infant is read as one way of developing Scheler’s theory of intersubjectivity and of Einsfühlung. This genetic approach is developed further into a phenomenological analysis of the experience of the fetus and of birth. The author argues that the analysis of the fetus highlights the distinction between knowing that another person is having experiences, and knowing the specific content of the other person’s experiences. The fetus does not experience different persons, but has a pre-subjective experience of life that includes what is later experienced as belonging to “another.” Later in life, the experience of empathy, as an experience of a specific content, can be developed from this experience. In this way empathy and Einsfühlung can be understood as complementary rather than as competing phenomena.