Ljerka Kovačić Tot

This paper examines immanence as a shared ontological principle in the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza, the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Roman Ingarden. Drawing on formal ontology and eidetic phenomenology, it investigates how these three philosophers, despite their distinct methodological frameworks, develop conceptions of being that require neither transcendental grounding nor an external guarantor of meaning. The analysis demonstrates that Spinoza's substance, Wittgenstein's logical space, and Ingarden's autonomous structure of the real object constitute different expressions of the same ontological pattern of self-contained and self-sufficient being. On this basis, the paper argues that immanence should be understood not merely as a metaphysical doctrine but as a formal principle governing the internal organization of reality, allowing meaning, necessity, and existential stability to emerge from within the world itself. It concludes that a profound structural isomorphism links these philosophical systems and provides a new interpretation of immanence as a defense of ontological plenitude against models of transcendence.

Phenomenological accounts of illness have consistently presupposed a disease that declares itself - through symptoms, through somatic disruption, through the breakdown of bodily transparency that forces the body into awareness and reorganises existence around the fact of pathology. Hans-Georg Gadamer's foundational account of health as self-concealment assumes a symmetrical counterpart: illness as the rupture of that concealment. This paper argues that a distinct and inadequately theorised patient experience challenges this assumption at its foundation, and that adequately theorising it requires operating simultaneously across ontological, metaphysical, and phenomenological registers. In atypical autoimmune disease - characterised by absent canonical serology, diagnosis by exclusion, and histological presentation that shifts with disease staging across time - the disease enacts its own concealment, remaining maximally present at the biochemical level while remaining entirely absent at the level of lived experience. This is not primarily an epistemological problem of diagnostic inadequacy but an ontological one: the self-concealing disease is a distinct kind of pathological entity whose mode of being differs fundamentally from that presupposed by existing frameworks. We propose three hypotheses to account for its structure. The Concealment Symmetry Hypothesis holds that the self-concealing disease mirrors health's self-concealment in a pathological register - an ontological claim about what disease can be, not merely about how it may be experienced. The Nosological Instability Hypothesis holds that serial diagnostic oscillation in such cases faithfully registers a disease whose identity is itself temporally unstable: at each clinical encounter a genuinely different histological object presents itself, raising metaphysical questions about persistence, identity, and what it means for a disease to remain the same disease across time. Phenomenological declaration occurs only when a superimposed physiological event of sufficient magnitude amplifies the biochemical signal above the threshold of somatic experience - a threshold-dependency that is structural rather than incidental. The Threshold Existence Hypothesis holds that the patient of the self-concealing disease inhabits a third ontological category between Gadamerian health and declared illness: neither operating in the surplus that genuine health provides nor reorganised by somatic disruption, but existing at the functional threshold itself - biochemically compromised, phenomenologically silent, capable of full worldly engagement across decades while remaining vulnerable at the margins. This mode of being, which we term threshold existence, can only be adequately theorised through phenomenological description, but its implications are irreducibly ontological. Drawing on Gadamer, Canguilhem, Merleau-Ponty, Toombs, Svenaeus, Carel, and Mol, we argue that threshold existence requires new philosophical vocabulary and that its theorisation has significant implications for how medicine understands, diagnoses, and communicates with patients whose illness does not declare itself in the expected register.

This essay proposes a phenomenological progression from solitude to empathy, mapped through the works of Henry David Thoreau, Clarice Lispector, Iris Murdoch, and Edith Stein. Utilizing Freya Mathews’ concept of conatus and relational cosmophysicism as an ontological ground, the author argues that presence is not a static achievement but a shifting configuration of conative unfolding. The trajectory moves from the "undisturbed" presence of Thoreau to the temporal and linguistic fractures in Lispector’s Água Viva, through the corrective discipline of Murdochian attention, and finally to the irreducible limit of the Other in Stein’s theory of empathy. By examining the inherent failure of language to capture the "living present" or the "irreducible other," the essay concludes that the movement from solitude to empathy is not a resolution of the self, but a deepening of the relational complexity and an acceptance of the constitutive limits of human understanding and naming.

This essay explores Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy through the central discipline of attention as both a phenomenological and ethical practice. Murdoch challenges modern ethical theories that privilege will, choice, and rational decision-making by relocating morality in perception rather than action. At the heart of her thought lies the “fat relentless ego” — a powerful psychological survival mechanism that simplifies reality through self-serving fantasy in order to manage anxiety and protect the self. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method of epoché, Murdoch transforms phenomenological reduction into a moral reduction: the suspension of egoistic interpretation itself. She develops attention, in dialogue with Simone Weil, as a form of “active passivity” — a disciplined waiting and high-energy intentionality that holds space for the surplus of reality. This gaze is neither passive relaxation nor forceful will, but a sustained effort to let the Other appear in its irreducible particularity. Murdoch grounds this practice in a Platonic vision of the Good as a non-consoling transcendent sun, connecting unselfing to Platonic eros, whereby beauty and excellence occasion the temporary silencing of the ego. She sharply distinguishes fantasy (the ego’s self-protective storytelling) from imagination (the creative power that enables just vision). The resistance of the object — whether a difficult grammar rule, a recalcitrant still-life, or the particularity of another person — serves as an external anchor that pulls consciousness out of solipsistic projection. The essay contrasts Murdoch’s austere ethics with the consoling narratives of historical progress in Hegel and psychic completion in Jung. It further examines how great art functions as a training ground for attention through the disciplined engagement with resistant form. Ultimately, Murdoch offers not a system of moral rules but an ethics of perception in which virtue emerges as the byproduct of clear, just, and loving attention. The very act of writing philosophy with thick, attentive concepts becomes a living instance of this moral discipline.

Abstract This essay explores the phenomenology of late cognitive acuity through an autoethnographic study of cognitive transformation after orthotopic liver transplantation at the age of 65. Despite ongoing immunosuppression, the author experienced a remarkable improvement in mental clarity, thought continuity, depth, tempo, and emotional lightness. This enhancement was achieved by combining medical treatment with deliberate metabolic optimization, including a lean low-carbohydrate diet and intensive physical activity. The analysis integrates detailed first-person phenomenological descriptions with current research on the liver-brain axis. This research encompasses various aspects, such as glucose homeostasis, detoxification, circadian re-entrainment of the denervated hepatic clock through molecular clock genes, and residual vagal portal signaling. The study argues that restored hepatic function significantly reduces physiological obstructions to the organism's conatus, as proposed by Spinoza. The result of this research is not merely improved cognitive performance but a qualitative reconfiguration of the lived experience of thinking itself in later life. This inquiry bridges philosophy of medicine, phenomenology of cognition, and embodied approaches to mind, suggesting that radical metabolic renewal can liberate intellectual and existential vitality even in advanced age. It calls for greater attention to the phenomenology of restored rather than declining cognition in late life.

This paper investigates interpretive divergence in clinical discourse from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, focusing on how differences arise between intended and inferred meaning in doctor–patient interaction. Building on relevance theory and models of pragmatic inference, the study examines how linguistically underspecified utterances give rise to divergent interpretations under conditions of epistemic asymmetry. The analysis is based on selected examples of clinical communication in which patients derive interpretations that differ from the speaker’s intended meaning. Particular attention is given to linguistic features such as hedging, temporal qualification, and indirectness, which guide interpretation while simultaneously increasing inferential demands. The findings indicate that interpretive divergence is not incidental but emerges from the interaction between linguistic form, contextual assumptions, and the hearer’s cognitive environment. The study proposes a heuristic typology of interpretive divergence, distinguishing between amplification, attenuation, and transformation as general patterns in the relationship between intended and inferred meaning. These categories capture the ways in which hearers may extend, reduce, or qualitatively shift the implications of an utterance, depending on the assumptions available to them. By conceptualizing divergence as a systematic outcome of inferential processes rather than as a communicative failure, the paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of meaning construction in institutional contexts. It also highlights the importance of examining how asymmetry and cognitive variability shape interpretation in clinical communication.

Abstract This paper investigates interpretive divergence in clinical discourse from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, focusing on how differences arise between intended and inferred meaning in doctor–patient interaction. Building on relevance theory and models of pragmatic inference, the study examines how linguistically underspecified utterances give rise to divergent interpretations under conditions of epistemic asymmetry. The analysis is based on selected examples of clinical communication in which patients derive interpretations that differ from the speaker’s intended meaning. Particular attention is given to linguistic features such as hedging, temporal qualification, and indirectness, which guide interpretation while simultaneously increasing inferential demands. The findings indicate that interpretive divergence is not incidental but emerges from the interaction between linguistic form, contextual assumptions, and the hearer’s cognitive environment. The study proposes a heuristic typology of interpretive divergence, distinguishing between amplification, attenuation, and transformation as general patterns in the relationship between intended and inferred meaning. These categories capture the ways in which hearers may extend, reduce, or qualitatively shift the implications of an utterance, depending on the assumptions available to them. By conceptualizing divergence as a systematic outcome of inferential processes rather than as a communicative failure, the paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of meaning construction in institutional contexts. It also highlights the importance of examining how asymmetry and cognitive variability shape interpretation in clinical communication.

This study presents an idiographic, qualitative autoethnographic analysis of narrative identity in the context of severe illness and liver transplantation. Drawing on Dan McAdams’ model of narrative identity, the paper examines how the self is reconstructed across three critical phases: an early episode of liver dysfunction, a later-life crisis culminating in transplantation, and post-transplant recovery. The dataset consists of longitudinal personal journal entries spanning over 15 years, providing temporally situated accounts of lived experience. Adopting a cognitive linguistic approach, the analysis focuses on the role of metaphor, grammatical agency, and temporal structuring in the construction of identity. The findings demonstrate that identity is systematically reconfigured through phase-specific linguistic patterns. The early episode is characterized by low agency and process-oriented descriptions, the pre-transplant phase by an agentic identity disrupted through a contamination sequence, and the post-transplant phase by the reassertion of agency and the emergence of vitality-based metaphor. The study argues that identity reconstruction following transplantation is not only narratively organized but linguistically enacted. By showing how shifts in agency, metaphor, and discourse structure correspond to transformations in self-construction, the paper contributes to research in applied linguistics, particularly in the areas of discourse, identity, and health-related narratives.

he question of how groups cohere — how a collection of separate individuals becomes, however temporarily, something more than the sum of its parts — is one that admits of multiple theoretical framings. Sociological accounts, drawing on the Durkheimian tradition, locate the binding force in collective effervescence, ritual practice, and the sui generis reality of social facts. Anthropological frameworks, particularly those indebted to Turner's analysis of liminality and communitas, attend to the threshold conditions under which ordinary social structures are suspended and new forms of solidarity become possible. Depth-psychological approaches, and Jungian theory in particular, reframe group coherence as a process of collective individuation in which each member carries a fragment of a larger psychic totality, and the group achieves what no single subject could: a provisional wholeness through complementary differentiation. Each of these perspectives illuminates a genuinely distinct dimension of the phenomenon, and none is reducible to the others. The present paper does not adjudicate among these competing frameworks. It proceeds, rather, from the premise that the phenomenon of group coherence as depicted in the Netflix series The OA (Marling and Batmanglij, 2016–2019) is sufficiently complex and sufficiently strange to require all of them — and that the most productive analytical posture is one of theoretical triangulation rather than reduction. Nevertheless, the primary focus of the analysis developed here is phenomenological. This choice is motivated not by the dismissal of alternative approaches, but by the conviction that the series' central dramatic device — the Five Movements, a sequence of embodied gestures that gradually constitutes a group of five strangers into something resembling a single collective subject — cannot be adequately described without a conceptual vocabulary that attends, at the level of first-person and inter- personal bodily experience, to what actually happens when bodies move together. Drawing principally on Merleau-Ponty's account of intercorporeality and the bodily schema, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's phenomenology of movement as kinetic melody, and Thomas Fuchs's theory of intercorporeal body memory, the paper develops the hypothesis that the group in The OA constitutes an emergent intersubjective body — a collective corporeal subject whose intentional capacities exceed those of any individual member and whose coherence is grounded not in shared belief or conscious coordination, but in the progressive Moving Together, Becoming One 2 sedimentation of a shared kinetic schema. The paper further examines how Husserl's distinction between Leib and Körper operates collectively within the group, and how Heidegger's concept of Mitsein is radicalized — from a merely structural co-existence to an intensely kinesthetic co- becoming — through the practice of the Movements. Methodologically, this is a conceptual and theoretical paper. It engages no primary empirical data and makes no claims of sociological generalizability. Its object of analysis is a fictional narrative, and it proceeds on the assumption — defended elsewhere in the growing literature on philosophy and television — that philosophically dense serial fiction can serve as a legitimate and productive site for phenomenological inquiry: not as illustration of pre-existing theory, but as a form of thought in its own right, capable of disclosing structures of experience that abstract argumentation alone may fail to reach. The paper is accordingly interdisciplinary in orientation, drawing on continental phenomenology, philosophy of mind, cultural theory, and media studies, while maintaining phenomenological description as its primary analytical mode. The paper concludes by identifying a theoretical gap in the phenomenological tradition: the absence of a fully elaborated account of emergent collective bodies — bodies that come into existence through practice, carry their own intercorporeal memory, and dissolve back into individuals when the practice ceases. The OA, it is argued, does not merely illustrate this gap but actively thinks at its edge — staging, through the Five Movements and their consequences, a phenomenological question that philosophy has not yet fully answered.