Marilyn Stendera

This article sets out a phenomenological account of mourning as a ground attunement and proposes that an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon is central to understanding the complex nature of all grief experiences. To support this claim, we begin by highlighting the inherent twofold structure of grief, which encompasses both an ontological and an ontic sense of loss. The ontic sense of loss refers to what is typically associated with grief—the particular loss of a significant relation within a person’s lifeworld. The ontological sense of loss, by contrast, designates a more generalized sense of loss, reflecting the negative grounds of human existence as marked by loss through the existential conditions of vulnerability, transience, and finitude. Building on this distinction, we explore how mourning functions as a ground attunement reflecting the ontological sense of loss. Finally, we illustrate the significance of recognizing mourning as a ground attunement for the analysis of experiences of loss. First, we demonstrate its role as a background attunement in all experiences of loss. Second, we focus on two cases in which mourning becomes foregrounded in experience: (a) mourning one’s own death and (b) ecological mourning. In the concluding remarks, we further reflect on the fundamental role of mourning as not only constitutive of mattering and caring, but maybe even as, as several authors have suggested, a driver for culture itself.

This paper presents experimental evidence that gender double standards significantly shape evaluative perceptions of men and women professors among philosophy students in Italian universities. Identical lecture passages, delivered either in written form (Study 1, N = 95) or orally (Study 2, N = 92) and attributed to authors with typically masculine or feminine names and voices, were used as stimuli. Participants were asked to respond to teaching evaluation questions. With regard to the written passages, the findings indicate that men participants’ evaluations are significantly influenced by what they believe to be the author’s gender, whereas women participants’ evaluations are not, with the exception of one single factor, namely engagement. In contrast, for orally delivered lectures, both men and women participants exhibit comparable gender biases.

Some theorists have argued that novel food objects spur ontological debates and are thus grounds for the disruption of problematic normative ontologies. In this paper, I take up this claim to consider how disputes about milk and alternatives, among them synthetic milk, manifest certain ontological commitments. Through a political approach to ontology, I argue that the disruption of hegemonic ontologies can afford novel ethical considerations otherwise concealed from view. Drawing on ecofeminist critique of dairy, and feminist critiques of biocapitalism, I show how debates about milk and alternatives reinscribe an ontology of living and natural bodies as resources for the accretion of capital, and the way that ontologies of sex, gender and nature function within these debates. I argue that the actual materiality of milk is concealed through industrial processes, as well as public discourse. I then offer an alternative materialist ontology of milk, on the basis that an emphasis on the materiality of mammalian milks, including human, can unveil ethical considerations otherwise concealed in conceptual debates about milk; I articulate this materiality as a relational materialist ontology, building on existing distinctions between substance and relational ontologies of food. I argue that the effect of this commitment to materiality is the provision is to counter a principalist approach to the ethics of milk by taking milk’s materiality as a paradigm for reflecting on the necessity of situatedness for any such ethics.

Our target article concerns the direction and growth of enactivism, a framework portrayed as a revolutionary shift in understanding cognition. While enactivism continues to be a lively position, it is unclear how its contributions relate to the cognitive sciences. Despite some empirical successes, enactivism remains somewhat insulated as a theoretical position and as a research program. There exists a discrepancy between enactivist aims and delivery. The basis of this problem, we argue, is that the overall objective of enactive theorising is not clear, which has led to diverging strategies for implementation and integration with the cognitive sciences. We review contributions from different strains of enactivism – autopoietic, sensorimotor and radical – and their research goals, both tacit and explicit. We show that enactivism is productively understood as two projects we term utopian enactivism and scientific enactivism. Utopian enactivism aims to develop a philosophically defensible lens through which cognitive science is to be viewed. Scientific enactivism intervenes in scientific practice by contributing to the implementation of enactive ideas. Once disentangled, the utopian and scientific projects have important but independent tasks. Utopian enactivism is useful for building a coherent and defensible enactive philosophy of nature, while scientific enactivism is free to draw upon and contribute to non-enactive approaches in the cognitive sciences. We aim to motivate discussions that will enhance enactivism’s progress, and our reappraisal also offers a clear and explicit roadmap for renewing advances in enactivist philosophy and cognitive science.

When a loved one dies, it is common for the bereaved to feel profoundly lonely, disconnected from the world with the sense that they no longer belong. In philosophy, this experience of ‘loss and loneliness’ has been interpreted according to both a loss of possibilities and a loss of the past. But it is unclear how these interpretations apply to the distinctive way in which loss and loneliness manifest in old age. Drawing on the phenomenological analyses of old age given by de Beauvoir and Améry, I consider how the diminishment of the capacity for projection and recollection complicate recent interpretations of loss and loneliness, whilst nevertheless reinforcing the conclusion that in old age subjectivity is necessarily impoverished. Developing a critical stance on de Beauvoir and Améry’s underlying conception of subjectivity, I turn to Levinas in considering whether or not there is a way to reimagine subjectivity such that the estrangement and alienation of older adults might be ameliorated rather than exacerbated. Grounded in the passive body-in-itself rather than the self-transcending capacity of the body-for-itself, I suggest it becomes possible to reconceptualise the experience of loss and loneliness in old age; both in terms of what is lost and what needs to be restored if older adults are to be helped to find themselves at home in the world in the midst of, and indeed because of, manifold loss.